Real-Time Interpretation (No Chinese Yet)

choi

Brian X Chen, Apple's New Airpods Are Not Leaving Anything Lost in Translation. New York Times, Sept 20, 2025, at page B1 (sesction B is Business).
https://www.myheraldreview.com/f ... 4-0516087bd65e.html

Quote:

(a) "This week, I saw an old friend, and he caught me up on what he'd been up to over the summer. He and his girlfriend had visited family in Arizona. His niece dragged him to a screening of 'Lilo and Stitch.' He was working hard at a new startup. He said all of this in Spanish, a language I have never learned, but I followed every word.

"I understood him because I was wearing the new Apple earbuds arriving in stores Friday [Sept 19, which is yeserday]. The $250 AirPods Pro 3 use artificial intelligence to do real-time translations, their most significant new feature. (The earphones, which have slightly better noise cancellation, are otherwise not that different from the last iteration [AirPods Pro 4 (available since September 2024)].) As my friend spoke, Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, acted as an interpreter, speaking in a robotic voice that immediately converted the Spanish words into English in my ears.

"Later, I reviewed a transcript of the conversation produced on my iPhone to confirm the accuracy of the translation. With the exception of a few mistakes where Siri mixed up pronouns (referring to my friend's girlfriend as a 'he' instead of a 'she'), it was solid.

(b) "And frankly, I was also surprised. Apple's foray into generative AI, the technology driving chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, has been rocky, to say the least. * * * The robust translation technology in the AirPods is a sign that Apple is still in the AI race, despite its early stumbles.

"For more than a decade, consumers have fumbled with language translation apps on their phones that were awkward to use, like Google Translate and Microsoft Translator. They required users to hold their phone’s microphone up to a person speaking a foreign language and wait for a translation to be shown on a screen or played through the phone's tiny speakers. The translations were often inaccurate.

"In contrast, AirPods * * * About a second after someone speaks, the translation is played in the wearer’' preferred language through the earbuds.

(c) To set up: "I had to open Apple's new Translate app and download the languages I wanted to translate. Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and English are available right now, and more are coming soon. I selected the language the other person was speaking (in this case, Spanish) and the language I wanted to hear it in.

(d) "The AirPods’ reliance on large language models, the technology that uses complex statistics to guess what words belong together, should make translations more accurate than past technologies, said Dimitra Vergyri [female], a director of speech technology at SRI, the research lab behind the initial version of Siri before it was acquired by Apple.

"Some words carry different meanings depending on the context, and large language models are capable of analyzing the full scope of a conversation to correctly interpret what people are saying. Older translation technologies were doing piecemeal translations one sentence at a time, which could result in big mistakes because they lacked context, Vergyri said.

"Yet the AI technology in the AirPods might still have blind spots that could lead to awkward social situations, she added. Words alone don't account for other types of context, like emotions and cultural nuances. * * *

Note:
(a)
(i) Sierra Vista Herald
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Vista_Herald
(1955- ; based in Sierra Vista, Arizona)
"is published very Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday each week. It is owned by Wick Communications, a third-generation family-owned community media company." per its website.
(ii) Sierra Vista, Arizona
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Vista,_Arizona
("According to the 2020 Census, the population of the city is 45,308[2] * * * Sierra Vista, Spanish for 'mountain view,' is 75 miles (121 km) southeast of Tucson
(b) catch up (vt): "to provide with the latest information  <catch me up on the news>"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/catch%20up
(c) AirAirPods connects, via Bluetooth, Apple device (iPhone or Mac) or Android device.