Google brings live translation to Meet, starting with Spanish

If you find Google’s live translation tools useful, you’ll soon be able to use them more naturally during video calls and meetings. The company announced today that it’s bringing the feature to Google Meet. Starting this week, AI-powered, real-time Spanish translation will be available in the app. Google says more languages are on the way and that the technology is “very, very close to having a natural and free-flowing conversation.”

During a brief demo, live translation in Meet matched the speaker’s tone and cadence, and was even able to channel expressions. There’s no doubt this will be useful for many people, especially on work calls with colleagues in other countries. Live translation will allow everyone to speak in the language they’re most comfortable with, and the technology will do the heavy lifting. Before now, you had to rely on live captions in Google Meet to do any translation, so not having to read those will allow users to be more in-tune with the conversation.

Starting today, live translation in Google Meet will be available to Google AI Pro and Ultra plans in beta. The company says the new features will be available for enterprise users later this year as part of an “early testing” phase.