This is probably due to concern about legal regulations around temporarily recording someone else's voice so it can be processed for translation. After all, there is no mechanism for the person you're talking to to provide "consent", and the EU does have particularly strong laws on this.
Alternatively it might have something to do with the translation being performed in iOS, and the capability not being exposed to competitor audio devices, and therefore Apple needs assurance the EU won't consider it anticompetitive?
Or both.
d1sxeyes · 1h ago
More likely the second than the first. It’s already the case that you technically “record” the audio at one end and then transmit it to the other. I can also forward a caller to voicemail where their message is transcribed in real time, which is fundamentally the same mechanics.
Or even more likely, as others have suggested, it’s Apple being petty and withholding features from EU users to put pressure on the EU.
_boffin_ · 4h ago
How would this function in two-party consent states like California? My understanding is limited, but from what I've read, this might still violate consent laws unless explicitly disclosed—even in public spaces.
I recently explored building a real-time STT system for sales calls to support cold-calling efforts. However, the consensus from my research was that, even if audio is streamed live without storage, consent laws could still present significant hurdles.
crazygringo · 4h ago
I think it really depends on the legal definition of recording or what it's used for.
Common sense says that a recording that only exists for a few seconds, and is utilized only by the person a speaker is intending to speak to, and is never permanently stored, should be fine. And we can assume Apple has made sure this is legal in its home state of California.
But EU law might not have sufficient legal clarity on this if it was written in a particularly open-ended way.
rsynnott · 4h ago
Also potentially AI Act concerns. Quite a lot of things involving our good friends the magic robots have a delayed launch in the EU, because they need to be compliant, whereas the space is for practical purposes completely unregulated in most other places.
JSR_FDED · 6h ago
My understanding is that this works on-device (via the iPhone), so I wonder what the regulatory issue is.
Perhaps the regulations treat is as if you’re “recording” the person you’re speaking with, without their consent?
pornel · 5h ago
Apple's response to EU's attempt to open up App Store has been full of pettiness, tantrums, and malicious compliance.
Apple is most likely withholding features in EU as a bargaining chip in antitrust negotiations, and to discredit EU's consumer protections. Pretending things in Europe are randomly unknowably illegal for no reason supports Apple's narrative and popular opinion in the US.
JustExAWS · 5h ago
The EU said that everything that Apple creates for its own devices has to have APIs for third parties. The translation feature only works for AirPods.
whazor · 6m ago
Also the feature doesn't work on Android, so it is not an 'AirPods' feature but a 'iOS'+'AirPods' feature.
hn8726 · 4h ago
Ok so it's not "airpods live translation" really, but "ios live translation" and there's no technical reason to limit it to airpods?
praseodym · 55m ago
Or other services, such as translation using Google Translate.
JustExAWS · 4h ago
The audio input comes from the AirPods not the iPhone. It’s processed on the iPhone.
The audio is captured by the outward facing microphones used for active noise cancellations. That’s why it only works for AirPods Pro 2, 3 and AirPods 4 with ANC. That wouldn’t just work with any headphones.
Even the AirPods Pro 2 will need a firmware update. They won’t work with just any old headphones and seeing that even the AirPods Pro 2 need a firmware update tells me that it is something they are doing with their H2 chip in their headphones in concert with the iPhone.
StopDisinfo910 · 2h ago
I mean, technically, any competitors with noise cancelling headphones able to pick up a voice stream would be able to use the same processing on the iPhone to offer an equivalent feature.
That it only works with AirPods is just Apple discriminating in favour of their own product which is exactly what the EU was going after.
JustExAWS · 2h ago
Sure if they also want to train a model that supports their sound profile, build an app that captures the audio, etc.
But their $60 ANC headphones with cheap audio processing hardware in the headphones aren’t going to be sufficient.
They may even be able to use the exposed models on the phone.
StopDisinfo910 · 1h ago
> But their $60 ANC headphones with cheap audio processing hardware in the headphones aren’t going to be sufficient.
The equivalent feature on Android tells me it would. I mean it already does technically.
Are we supposed to treat Apple being late to the party as usual as some kind of exceptional thing only them could do?
JustExAWS · 1h ago
According to the specs - it only works with Google’s own headphones
Which are the same price as Apple’s AirPods with ANC.
So Google also didn’t try to support the feature with generic earbuds.
StopDisinfo910 · 1h ago
The contrary is literally written in a large yellow box on the page you linked:
“Note: Google Translate works with all Assistant-optimized headphones and Android phones.”
But I mean, you are free to buy overpriced Apple headphones which sounds worse than Sony, only properly works paired with an Apple phone or laptop and whose killer feature was available on their competitors buds years ago if that rocks your boat.
JustExAWS · 52m ago
You didn’t look at the prices of other “Google assistant” compatible headphones did you?
Why would I want to by a none Apple laptop with horrible battery life, loud, and that produces enough heat to ensure that I don’t have offspring if I actually put it on my lap?
gabrielso · 6h ago
Yeah make it work in the US where you can fly 4 hours in any direction and still land somewhere that speaks the same language, and not in Europe where a 1:30h drive takes you through 3 different countries that don't know how to talk to each other...
wil421 · 1h ago
Where do you live? I could easily find people who speak, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Hindu, Telugu, English, Spanish, Thai, and Portuguese and I haven’t even left the parking lot. It would be harder to find a German or French speaker.
aegypti · 5h ago
It also works in the entire Rest of World outside the EU
urda · 2h ago
You can blame the EU for that, not Apple.
notrealyme123 · 2m ago
No you should absolutely blame apple for that. They fear to lose their monopoly and want to set an example for other countries.
JustExAWS · 16m ago
I can easily drive one and half miles in Orlando to my barber shop where half the barbers only speak Spanish. I’m not complaining, it forces me to use my A1-A2 level Spanish fluency.
nozzlegear · 4h ago
13-14% of the US population speak Spanish at home.
numpad0 · 2h ago
Were there any breakthrough for this feature anyway? Or is it more likely that Apple just did what was readily possible?
You could always put environmental audio through Whisper, attain audio trance crypt at 51010 per cent Word error rate, put that transcript through machine translation, and finally TTS. Or you can put audio directly through multimodal LLM for marginal improvements, I guess, but ASR error rate as well as automatic cleanup performance don't seem to have improved significantly after OpenAI Whisper was released.
kstrauser · 17m ago
> attain audio trance crypt at 51010 per cent Word error rate
Was this post the output of such a pipeline, by chance?
ageospatial · 3h ago
GDPR is solid. But main reason is that it's just hard to make it work with the AI act, various languages could also be the reason (product not adding enough value to customers?)
4ndrewl · 2h ago
I'd be surprised if this isn't about data residency and gdpr. As someone using the headphones you may end up becoming a "data processor" in gdpr-legal terms.
You've not given the person being recorded any way to exercise their legal rights around collecting, inspecting and deleting their data.
pornel · 1h ago
GDPR is about collection and processing of personally identifiable information. These are specific legal terms that depend on the context in which the data is collected and used, not just broadly any data anywhere that might have something to do with a person.
GDPR is aimed at companies building user databases, not allowing them to completely ignore security, accuracy, user complaints, and sell anything to anybody while lying about it. It doesn't limit individual people's personal use of data.
robin_reala · 2m ago
GDPR doesn’t mention “personally identifiable information” once; it’s concerned with personal data, which is “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’)”.
The rest is correct: the restrictions are aimed at organisations, not individuals.
I mean studying a technology with this scale to assess its impact before allowing it freely is… not terrible?
solardev · 6h ago
What do you mean? Aren't EU regulations obsolete now and unable to keep up with economic realities, causing the EU to lose its competitive edge? My Airpods told me so!
lm28469 · 4h ago
The whole US economy is propped up by FAANG which are either data collectors, surveillance tools, ad delivery mechanism or competing to suck your attention out of your body, you can keep your competitive edge.
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> whole US economy is propped up by FAANG
This is nonsense. The stock market had been propped up by FAANG. But with AI we have a few trillion dollars of value being created by new entrants (e.g. OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic) and legacy companies newly stepping on FAANG (e.g. Oracle, Perplexity).
It may all be a fever dream. But like the dark fiber of the 90s, it should—worst case—leave behind a lot of energy and datacentre infrastructure. (If Washington would get out of the way.)
JustExAWS · 13m ago
And none of those are public companies and no one knows how much any of those companies are worth.
Right now using the valuation technique that tge value of a company is the net present value of all future returns * some multiple, we don’t know if any of them will ever be valuable.
JustExAWS · 5h ago
Shouldn’t the lack of any major tech companies out of the EU and comparatively piss poor comp of tech workers tell you that?
solardev · 5h ago
I was being facetious, but no... I think the quality of life, in terms of livability, in the EU is much higher than in the US. I would much rather have strong social and consumer and legal protections and healthcare and safety nets than strong corporations that rule everything.
If you're rich, I'm sure the US is great. If you're not, it's not a great place to live.
nozzlegear · 3h ago
Americans consume more goods and services, live in larger homes, and have a higher material standard of living than Europeans, on the median. The US does spend much more on healthcare, but the outcomes are largely comparable to Europe’s (meaning universal healthcare has not actually given Europeans a clear advantage in lived results).
Europeans also get mandated parental leave and vacation time, far better labour laws, better health-related regulatory conditions (e.g. food, drugs, agriculture, environment, gun control, etc.), and so on, and don't go bankrupt and lose everything because of a heart attack or pregnancy complications.
Having a big house and more money doesn't mean you have a better life; this seems to be the main point of the article you linked, but your comment seems to imply that you missed that point (though I could be misreading). Case in point, this quote from the blog:
> I could go on, but the pattern is pretty clear. The U.S. in general is less healthy and less safe than Europe.
nozzlegear · 2h ago
> Having a big house and more money doesn't mean you have a better life; this seems to be the main point of the article you linked, but your comment seems to imply that you missed that point (though I could be misreading). Case in point, this quote from the blog: [...]
No, I didn't miss the point; there's excellent data in that article for people who think the US is a great place to live, and people who think Europe is a great place to live. That's the beauty of the article, and the crux of my point: both of those groups can be correct – there's no single "this is the greatest place to live for all human beings, periodt" out there. The article concludes:
> But as one final thought, I’d like to offer the hypothesis that life is just about equally as good in all developed countries. There’s personal preference, of course — if you want a big house and a lawn, you might prefer America or Canada, whereas if you want national health insurance and lower crime rates, you might prefer Japan or France. But in terms of where the average person would want to live given the choice, I think all these rich countries are in the same ballpark.
StopDisinfo910 · 2h ago
Sorry but the outcomes are not comparable.
Average infant mortality rate in the USA: 5.6 per thousand
Average infant mortality rate in the EU: 3.25 per thousand
Life expectancy in the USA: 78.4 years
Life expectance in the EU: 81.7 years
nozzlegear · 2h ago
Frankly I think we need to establish a definition for comparable if you're going to nitpick the numbers of infant mortality rates and life expectancy between two modern Western democracies. The average infant mortality rate in Canada is 4.4 deaths per thousand, is that comparable to the EU? The UAE is sitting pretty at 4 per thousand so that's obviously more comparable than Canada. Russia's at 6.42 so they're out.
Anyway, my point is those numbers are comparable when there are countries like Mexico, Brazil and India out there with an infant mortality rate of 11, 12.5 and 25 deaths per thousand, respectively.
(For the record I don't think the US is a better place to live than the EU, I just don't think it's worse either.)
pmdr · 5h ago
Just add another cookie banner before each session and you'll be fine, Apple.
renewiltord · 3h ago
It makes sense that increased regulation will delay feature release. This is a trade off that Europeans seem fine with. Seems fine to me.
danudey · 3h ago
In Canada we have roughly equivalent regulation for many (most?) things and still get delayed feature releases half the time, so at least the EU is getting something out of it.
Alternatively it might have something to do with the translation being performed in iOS, and the capability not being exposed to competitor audio devices, and therefore Apple needs assurance the EU won't consider it anticompetitive?
Or both.
Or even more likely, as others have suggested, it’s Apple being petty and withholding features from EU users to put pressure on the EU.
I recently explored building a real-time STT system for sales calls to support cold-calling efforts. However, the consensus from my research was that, even if audio is streamed live without storage, consent laws could still present significant hurdles.
Common sense says that a recording that only exists for a few seconds, and is utilized only by the person a speaker is intending to speak to, and is never permanently stored, should be fine. And we can assume Apple has made sure this is legal in its home state of California.
But EU law might not have sufficient legal clarity on this if it was written in a particularly open-ended way.
Perhaps the regulations treat is as if you’re “recording” the person you’re speaking with, without their consent?
Apple is most likely withholding features in EU as a bargaining chip in antitrust negotiations, and to discredit EU's consumer protections. Pretending things in Europe are randomly unknowably illegal for no reason supports Apple's narrative and popular opinion in the US.
The audio is captured by the outward facing microphones used for active noise cancellations. That’s why it only works for AirPods Pro 2, 3 and AirPods 4 with ANC. That wouldn’t just work with any headphones.
Even the AirPods Pro 2 will need a firmware update. They won’t work with just any old headphones and seeing that even the AirPods Pro 2 need a firmware update tells me that it is something they are doing with their H2 chip in their headphones in concert with the iPhone.
That it only works with AirPods is just Apple discriminating in favour of their own product which is exactly what the EU was going after.
But their $60 ANC headphones with cheap audio processing hardware in the headphones aren’t going to be sufficient.
They may even be able to use the exposed models on the phone.
The equivalent feature on Android tells me it would. I mean it already does technically.
Are we supposed to treat Apple being late to the party as usual as some kind of exceptional thing only them could do?
https://support.google.com/googlepixelbuds/answer/7573100?hl...
Which are the same price as Apple’s AirPods with ANC.
So Google also didn’t try to support the feature with generic earbuds.
But I mean, you are free to buy overpriced Apple headphones which sounds worse than Sony, only properly works paired with an Apple phone or laptop and whose killer feature was available on their competitors buds years ago if that rocks your boat.
And those Sony ones aren’t cheap.
The first review I found comparing them..
https://wasteofserver.com/sony-wf-1000xm4-vs-apple/
Why would I want to by a none Apple laptop with horrible battery life, loud, and that produces enough heat to ensure that I don’t have offspring if I actually put it on my lap?
You could always put environmental audio through Whisper, attain audio trance crypt at 51010 per cent Word error rate, put that transcript through machine translation, and finally TTS. Or you can put audio directly through multimodal LLM for marginal improvements, I guess, but ASR error rate as well as automatic cleanup performance don't seem to have improved significantly after OpenAI Whisper was released.
Was this post the output of such a pipeline, by chance?
You've not given the person being recorded any way to exercise their legal rights around collecting, inspecting and deleting their data.
GDPR is aimed at companies building user databases, not allowing them to completely ignore security, accuracy, user complaints, and sell anything to anybody while lying about it. It doesn't limit individual people's personal use of data.
The rest is correct: the restrictions are aimed at organisations, not individuals.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj/eng#art_4.tit_...
This is nonsense. The stock market had been propped up by FAANG. But with AI we have a few trillion dollars of value being created by new entrants (e.g. OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic) and legacy companies newly stepping on FAANG (e.g. Oracle, Perplexity).
It may all be a fever dream. But like the dark fiber of the 90s, it should—worst case—leave behind a lot of energy and datacentre infrastructure. (If Washington would get out of the way.)
Right now using the valuation technique that tge value of a company is the net present value of all future returns * some multiple, we don’t know if any of them will ever be valuable.
If you're rich, I'm sure the US is great. If you're not, it's not a great place to live.
Source: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/americans-are-generally-richer...
Having a big house and more money doesn't mean you have a better life; this seems to be the main point of the article you linked, but your comment seems to imply that you missed that point (though I could be misreading). Case in point, this quote from the blog:
> I could go on, but the pattern is pretty clear. The U.S. in general is less healthy and less safe than Europe.
No, I didn't miss the point; there's excellent data in that article for people who think the US is a great place to live, and people who think Europe is a great place to live. That's the beauty of the article, and the crux of my point: both of those groups can be correct – there's no single "this is the greatest place to live for all human beings, periodt" out there. The article concludes:
> But as one final thought, I’d like to offer the hypothesis that life is just about equally as good in all developed countries. There’s personal preference, of course — if you want a big house and a lawn, you might prefer America or Canada, whereas if you want national health insurance and lower crime rates, you might prefer Japan or France. But in terms of where the average person would want to live given the choice, I think all these rich countries are in the same ballpark.
Average infant mortality rate in the USA: 5.6 per thousand Average infant mortality rate in the EU: 3.25 per thousand
Life expectancy in the USA: 78.4 years Life expectance in the EU: 81.7 years
Anyway, my point is those numbers are comparable when there are countries like Mexico, Brazil and India out there with an infant mortality rate of 11, 12.5 and 25 deaths per thousand, respectively.
(For the record I don't think the US is a better place to live than the EU, I just don't think it's worse either.)