Google’s Gemini 3.5 Live Translate enables realistic real-time translation at the speed of natural conversations
Google LLC’s newest artificial intelligence tool promises to bring real-time translation to every smartphone user, enabling more natural and fluid conversations between speakers of different languages.
That’s according to a new blog post which announced the arrival of Gemini 3.5 Live Translate, which explained that it’s the company’s most advanced audio model for speech-to-speech translation released to date. Whereas traditional translation tools have always been cumbersome because of the way speech is processed and then translated in turns, Gemini 3.5 Live Translate is much speedier. According to Google, it’s able to listen continuously as someone is talking, translate what they’re saying and then speak to the other person in their own language.
What this means is that non-multilinguals will be able to engage in almost-natural conversations, with only a couple of seconds of delay – similar perhaps, to long-distance telephone calls back in the days of rotary telephones.
Google Product Manager Anuda Weerasinghe and Senior Staff Software Engineer Tony Lu said in the co-authored blog post that Gemini 3.5 Live Translate is able to detect which language a person is speaking automatically, so there’s no need to set anything up first. It supports more than 70 languages at launch, and that means it can support “thousands” of different language pairings. The company is making it available to developers and enterprises, so we can expect the capability to be integrated with third-party communication platforms in the near future. Of course, it’s also being rolled out to everyone directly in the Google Translate application.
