Apple’s Travel Upgrades: New Digital Passport, Live Translation for Messages and Calls

Digital U.S. passports and live translation — those were the biggest travel upgrades Apple announced during its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote on Monday.

Apple said the digital passport is coming to the iPhone’s digital Wallet starting this fall. 

“While not a replacement for your physical passport, digital ID can be used for domestic travel at supported TSA checkpoints, in apps, and in person where age and identify verification are required,” according to Kathy Lin, manager for services software engineering at Apple.

Google announced a similar feature in September. A TSA spokesperson told Skift at the time that it was about 10 years in the making, even as other countries have already implemented various digital passport programs. 

Apple already enables ID storage for nine U.S. states and Puerto Rico. Lin said there are more on the way. 

Below are details about more travel products that Apple announced – the upgrades are coming this fall, Apple said.

Live Translation 

Apple is integrating live translation into the apps for Messages, FaceTime, and Phone. 

Those capabilities are accessible through all devices that have those apps, including the iPhone, iPad, iMac, and Watch. 

During calls on the Phone app, for example, the AI can generate spoken translations between two people speaking different languages. In the Apple demo, an English speaker asks a German caterer about upcoming availability. The caterer responds in German and after a brief delay, you can hear the English translation. It works even if one of the people doesn’t use an iPhone, Apple said. 

The FaceTime app can show automatically translated captions when the callers are speaking different languages. 

The Messages app will send automatically translated text to a recipient, as well as automatically translate incoming messages.

The iMac is getting a new phone app with the same live translation feature. 

"Live Translation in Messages supports English (U.S., UK), French (France), German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (Spain), and Chinese (simplified). Live Translation in Phone and FaceTime is available for one-on-one calls in English (U.S., UK), French (France), German, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish (Spain)," Apple said.

Refreshed Boarding Passes 

The iPhone Wallet is getting an upgrade for its flight boarding passes. There’s a new connection with Maps for easier airport navigation.  

There’s a new connection to the Find My app so users can more easily see the whereabouts of any Apple Tag tracking devices and report missing bags if needed. The passes themselves will show real-time flight updates, with the ability to share with others. 

For Developers 

Apple said that developers can enable the new live translation within their third-party apps. And developers for travel and other companies can build apps that leverage generative AI from Apple Intelligence, even when the user is offline. 

Apple used the hiking app AllTrails as an example. With an upgraded app, the user should be able to search for hikes using everyday language.  

Other Travel-Related Updates 

• Maps: Enable phone to track when at locations like restaurants or shops and save them to Visited Places in Maps to review later or share.
• iPhone: Take a screenshot, automatically add to calendar. 
• iMac: Live Activities updates, like for flights or Uber, coming to menu bar. 
• Messages: Create polls in group chats for group travel planning.
• Messages: Exchange money through Apple Cash in group messages.
• Messages: Time sensitive text messages are marked, like if a table reservation is ready.
• Vision Pro headset: Lifelike 3-D photos and videos.
• Vision Pro headset: Digitally travel to Jupiter’s moons.
• Apple Music: Lyrics translation and pronunciation.

Last year, Apple announced the Apple Intelligence AI model and its plan for a ChatGPT-enhanced Siri. The company said that the upgraded Siri would be able to pull context from across apps to plan dinner in time for an event, or share real-time flight information.

Apple has faced criticism for not releasing that anticipated feature. 

“This work needed more time to reach our high quality bar, and we look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year,” said Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering for Apple, during the event on Monday.