Apple just announced AirPods Pro 3 (along with lots of other stuff – read everything Apple announced at its iPhone 17 event here), and as part of the announcement it showed off a new Live Translation feature.
This takes the speech of someone speaking to you in another language and converts it to your own language in your ears via your AirPods. You can speak back, and your iPhone will show what you're saying in their language. If two people are both using AirPods, you can just talk and have the whole conversation translated.
Here's Apple's demo of Live Translation:
Now, you might assume (as I initially did) that this is an AirPods Pro 3 exclusive, since Apple doesn't mention it coming to any other earbuds – but it's not. Apple's language is ambiguous during the section, and looking at the comparison pages for different AirPods models after the event reveals that more models will get this feature.
Specifically, it's the AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4 with ANC that will get it. This makes sense – they both use the same H2 chip as the AirPods Pro 3, and both have active noise cancellation, so that the buds can quieten down the person's speech in your ears and fill in the translation instead.
The cheapest AirPods 4 have the H2 chip, but don't have active noise cancellation, so they will miss out on the feature. And the AirPods Max have the older H1 chip, so miss out on this along with so many other features – including other new AirPods features announced for iOS 26.
Apple says "Live Translation with AirPods works on AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation and AirPods Pro 2 and later with the latest firmware when paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone running iOS 26 and later."
As for the languages supported by Live Translation, Apple says: "Live Translation on AirPods is available in English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish, and will be coming to four more languages by the end of the year: Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese (simplified)."
If you want to see a full rundown of how all the different AirPods models compare for features, here's a big ol' list.
