Live translation is the biggest draw for me. Wondering if anyone has received their AirPods and has used live translation?

Does it work as advertised? Does it work better than Google Translate? Are there any languages not supported?

Hey everyone,

I just upgrade to iOS 26 this morning and tried out Live Translation with a Portuguese speaking friend.

For context, we were in a rather loud cafe.

I'd speak in English and show the translation on my phone to him, and he'd respond in Portuguese.

The results:

• He said the translation quality was perfect, it picked up all the contextual things and it made no mistakes.

• The voice playing in my ear was a bit faint, and it wasn't interacting with ANC as I think it is supposed to.

• Sometimes in the middle of playing back a translation, I'd get a warning saying something like "Ambient noise is quite high, try moving closer to the sound source for better results". I didn't mind getting told this, but it would interrupt its own playback to tell me that, making it pretty hard for me to follow what they were saying.

• Translations don't start until the speaker has finished. I guess this is so all context can be captured to provide the best translation, but this only works in practice for short sentences. If the speaker talks for a while it's pretty odd to just sit there listening to the translation before you can respond. It would be cool if Apple could detect the end of a sentence and beginning translating that.

Over all we were both pretty blown away, certainly some teething issues but if he didn't speak English at all we'd still be able to have a conversation, which is pretty incredible.