Say goodbye to language barriers as Google Meet speech translation rolls out on Android

Voice alone can’t capture the subtle nuances, facial expressions, and body language shifts that tend to come with every conversation. Which is why video calls can be so important, especially if you’re communicating with people from different regions. This is why tools like Google Meet’s speech translation are vital, providing ways to communicate when you otherwise couldn’t.

This feature made its way to the web version just last month, and we also got an early report that it would eventually find its way to the app as well. With that said, the time has finally come to experience real-time speech translations on the Google Meet app on iOS and Android.

Google announced that the feature will start rolling out today, which means you’ll now be able to communicate more seamlessly with people outside your region in Google Meet on your mobile devices.

How does it work?

This is probably the part people are going to care about most, so let’s break it down. In order to get this working, you’ll need to head into the Settings menu, dive into the Tools section, and enable the Speech translation feature. In this section, you’ll have the option to choose what language will be translated.

As you might have noticed, there isn’t an option to translate all languages. Google states that only “one language pair can be active in a meeting at a time.” For now, Google Meet supports “bidirectional translation between English and Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian.”

When the speech translation feature is being used, users will hear translated speech from other users, but they won’t hear their own words being translated. For the most part, this should all be pretty impressive. Google does highlight that future improvements already include plans to refine translations and nuance, along with improving the user interface.

Again, this is a feature that’s been live on the web version of Google Meet. The change is that you can now access the speech translation feature on Android and iOS devices. If you’re someone who constantly has to catch meetings on the go, this should be a fairly useful feature.

This feature will be on by default and will start rolling out today to Rapid Release domains. Those on Scheduled Release domains will start seeing this feature on April 23. There’s a 15-day rollout for both cycles, so if you’re not seeing it yet, be patient.