Skift Takes Apple’s Live Translation On The Road
Photo Caption: San Francisco's Union Square. Photo by Adriana Lee
Skift Take
Is Apple’s AirPods-enabled Live Translation a helpful digital interpreter for travelers, or a recipe for frustration? Skift puts it to the test.
Star Trek’s Universal Translator can rest easy: Captain Kirk wouldn’t trade it for a pair of AirPods with Live Translation. But for people boldly going where they don’t speak the language, Apple’s digital interpreter is a handy tool.
That’s my takeaway after testing it last weekend in various settings across the San Francisco Bay Area. I chose scenarios that travelers could encounter while abroad: A Spanish-language walking tour, a chat with a French speaker at a festival, and a German film screening.
What it does well, it does very well. Users can listen to translations as the speaker talks, instead of focusing on a phone screen to read them. That’s more valuable than it sounds, because it lets them stay engaged and focus on the other person, not the tech.
The experience was designed to fit into conversations seamlessly. It didn’t quite live up to that, with some lags, stumbles, and glitches. But, as Apple is quick to point o
