(Credit: Viva Tung/PCMag/Apple)
Communication between people who don't share a language can prove challenging. Learning a new one is an option, but that's a time-consuming and potentially costly solution. Besides, what if you just want to ask your non-English-speaking in-laws out to lunch? Apple has expanded its translation chops in iOS 26 with Live Translation, and you don't need the new AirPods Pro 3 to take advantage of this tech. With iOS 26, any Apple Intelligence-compatible iPhone (iPhone 15 Pro or newer) can translate messages, phone calls, and FaceTime calls in real time. I tested Live Translation on an iPhone 15 Pro Max by placing my English-speaking wife on a call with my Spanish-speaking mother to see if it could handle a conversation between the two. Spoiler: It can, and surprisingly well.
How to Activate Live Translation in iOS 26
Before my test results, a bit of background. The iPhone translation tech isn't exactly new; Apple has had a built-in Translate app since iOS 14. However, with iOS 26, Live Translation comes to phone calls, FaceTime, and Messages. When enabled, it automatically converts incoming messages or audio into a language of your choosing.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)Live Translation is easy to enable, even when you're in the middle of a call. To get started, make sure you turn on Apple Intelligence; you can't use Live Translation without it. Once enabled, you press the More button during a phone or FaceTime call, denoted by the three ellipses, and then select Live Translation from the list of options. You're then asked to choose the incoming language and the language you want it translated to. That's it.
Testing Live Translation Via Phone
As I'm fluent in both English and Spanish, my tests were limited to those languages. However, Live Translation is compatible with five languages during calls: English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. I called my wife and set Live Translation to translate her English into Spanish. This worked extremely well, even when she whispered into the phone so as not to wake the baby. I began speaking Spanish, and Live Translation on her iPhone 15 Pro took the wheel. It delivered both voiced translation and translated captions of my speech with a two-to-three-second delay.
The real test came when we called my mother, who relies on Spanish to cover her broken English. My wife spoke with her for a few minutes, making mundane conversation about the baby and supper, helping them both bridge the communication gap they've been sidestepping for several years.
Admittedly, we kept our conversations relatively simple. Live Translation handled questions like, "How is the baby doing?" or "We're having fried chicken for dinner" with ease. The delay naturally slowed the pace of the conversation. However, it was a minor inconvenience that delivered pretty good results.
There were a few words or phrases that Live Translation didn't catch or misunderstood, but the gist of most utterances was caught and accurately translated. In one instance, Live Translation cut off my sentence, which resulted in a somewhat odd translation. "I'm gonna wash these dishes before I go to bed," got cut off early to "I'm gonna wash," which lacked context. In addition, Live Translation misheard the Spanish word for "appears" (aparecer) as "hurry" (apurarse). However, it was overall extremely accurate and surprisingly fun to use.
Live Translation even understood and translated word contractions. "Imma make myself lunch" was accurately translated to "Voy a prepararme el almuerzo," for example. It also accurately translated expressions from Spanish to English, even if the sentence was oddly phrased. "Se suena que esta trabajando bien" translates directly into "It sounds like it is working well," which is the translation provided to my wife, despite "sounds like" being an abnormal phrase in Spanish when compared with "seems like," which is more accepted.
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)Testing Live Translation Via Messages and FaceTime
To activate Live Translation in Messages, tap a contact's portrait, select the language you want the incoming words translated into, and tap Automatically Translate. During testing, the app adequately translated my wife's incoming English messages into Spanish for me to read, with no noticeable delay. These translations were just as accurate as those provided by the phone app translations.
FaceTime worked similarly well, with captioned translations of incoming speech appearing at the phone display's top for easy reading. Like Messages and phone calls, these translations were fast and consistently accurate. Unlike with phone calls, Live Translate didn't provide voiced translation; we only received translated captions. Live Translation during FaceTime is nice if you want to hear your family or friends' natural voices, but I would like an audio option in a future update.
Even so, Live Translation already works well, and I look forward to using it more regularly in the future. It's especially useful because your iPhone does all of the work. It doesn’t matter whether the person on the other end has updated to iOS 26 or even has an iPhone.
iOS 26 is available for download now.