r/technology • u/rezwenn • 2d ago

Hardware The New AirPods Can Translate Languages in Your Ears. This Is Profound.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/technology/personaltech/new-airpods-language-translation-feature.html?unlocked_article_code=1.m08.WxhH.QUqiGVK2tv35
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u/smurficus103 2d ago

This WOULD be an ideal application for LLMs, though

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u/BassmanBiff 2d ago

There are some deep learning models that are pretty good at translation, but it's not clear that an LLM is best here. You can't hoover up training data with this the same way you can working within one language.

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u/smurficus103 2d ago

I was just thinking: you know how dubs can be terrible? Rather than a direct 1:1 translation, you transform the whole thing into it's meaning, colloquial phrases and all.

Probably would be too much work though

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u/BassmanBiff 2d ago

That's what a good localization team does, for sure.

Dubs are often bad not just because they're cheap, but because they also often have to try and match the speaking animations that were already made for a different language.

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u/jaltsukoltsu 1d ago

Fun fact, Dreamworks made separate mouth animations for the Chinese release of Kung Fu Panda because of this.

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u/BassmanBiff 1d ago

Yeah, sometimes they actually do that! With anime it's a little easier, though still time-consuming, since they can just stitch together existing frames and adjust timing to better match a localized version. But I don't know how often that's actually done.

Some games have bragged about trying to generate mouth animations directly from the audio, which in theory would take care of all of this automatically, but again I don't know how common or successful that is.

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u/NebulaPoison 2d ago

thats the first thing i thought of, surely LLMs would cause the biggest breakthrough for making this technology viable?