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...
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?
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?)
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.
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.
As part of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) evaluation [0], Apple was found to operate a market for headphones connected to its devices, while competing in the same market with own products and giving itself a competitive advantage by creating OS-features exclusive to them.
The EU found this is not a level playing field for competition and ordered that they have to make such OS features available for other accessory manufacturers as well.
I guess they are currently either trying to make a case for the EU on how it is technically impossible to provide the feature to others, prove that this is somehow not an OS-feature (and should be excluded) or delay any action to maximize the benefit of this competitive advantage in other markets.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are also beats headphones in the pipeline for which they want to use this feature as competitive USP...
So consumers will just buy from another brand and use that instead?
I get the Apple is trying to spread propaganda that anti-competitive laws are bad for consumers, but in this case, consumers will just buy from another brand and it's a simple net loss for Apple.
No consideration for trade-offs involved here, it’s naive at best
It’s enormously difficult to ship any interesting feature that integrates hardware and software. The EU wants Apple to happily accept a burden that makes it harder to produce the products that made it popular in the first place.
I’m disappointed the EU won’t be getting these features (at least not quickly) but I’m hoping the citizenry realizes who’s to blame here
I wish technology is not blocked that easily. I doubt people want this feature to be banned. Apple's live translation is probably the greatest feature of the last 30 years. I wanted it so bad, I lived in India and South-East Asia for 3 years, it would definitely make my experience SO much better.
Unfortunate. Europe, it seems to me, would be one of the more useful places on Earth to have this technology since there are so many languages in use. It could even strengthen European cultural heritage by allowing everyone to speak in their native language day-to-day instead of converging everything to English.
Google Pixel Buds have a translation feature, and a bunch of other "Gemini AI" gimmicks, available in the EU.
Apple managed to get approvals for medical devices and studies (highly regulated everywhere), custom radios and satellite communication (highly regulated everywhere).
Apple already has machine translation, voice recognition, voice recording, and dictation features shipped in the EU.
But when EU hurt Apple's ego by daring to demand to give users freedom to run software they want on devices they bought (that could break them out of a very lucrative duopoly), Apple suddenly is a helpless baby who cannot find a way to make a new UI available in the EU.
Most probably as you say they can't ship the capability yet, so they're blaming the regulations.
Or really the headphones actively register and send data outside of the EU. There's been some pushback recently on this front (ie. recent MSFT case [1]) since it's a known fact in the field that the approved 2023 EU-US DPF is basically BS, as it doesn't really address the core issues for which US companies were deamed not-compatible with GDPR.
Apple has clearly made very significant investment in creating a LLM small and efficient enough to do inference locally on an iPhone. This is excellent work and should be applauded.
For the EU, the issue is that Apple intends to recoup this investment through premium-pricing a different product in another category - one that has many low-cost competitors.
Wouldn't this best be resolved by productising the Apple LLM? Earphone API becomes open, as required by EU. However, use of the Apple LLM would be controlled by license. Earbud competitors could either license Apple's LLM, perhaps on a FRAND basis, or they could install their own LLM on an iOS device. Apple may bundle its LLM but must allow users to uninstall Apple's LLM, to free up space for alternatives.
In short, this isn't and shouldn't be about access to IOS for earbuds. EU is right in this. It's about monetising access to the Apple LLM, for which Apple deserves a revenue stream.
Disney owns the land and their intellectual property, Apple does not and should not own devices and software they already sold. Especially not by imposing artificial software restrictions.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 71.0 ms ] threadPerhaps the regulations treat is as if you’re “recording” the person you’re speaking with, without their consent?
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.
You are also allowed to record and film in any public space.
You've not given the person being recorded any way to exercise their legal rights around collecting, inspecting and deleting their data.
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.
Meta glasses also: https://www.meta.com/help/ai-glasses/955732293123641
but how would these airpods really be able to know you're in the EU? this should be easily hackable
As part of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) evaluation [0], Apple was found to operate a market for headphones connected to its devices, while competing in the same market with own products and giving itself a competitive advantage by creating OS-features exclusive to them.
The EU found this is not a level playing field for competition and ordered that they have to make such OS features available for other accessory manufacturers as well.
I guess they are currently either trying to make a case for the EU on how it is technically impossible to provide the feature to others, prove that this is somehow not an OS-feature (and should be excluded) or delay any action to maximize the benefit of this competitive advantage in other markets.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are also beats headphones in the pipeline for which they want to use this feature as competitive USP...
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
I get the Apple is trying to spread propaganda that anti-competitive laws are bad for consumers, but in this case, consumers will just buy from another brand and it's a simple net loss for Apple.
It’s enormously difficult to ship any interesting feature that integrates hardware and software. The EU wants Apple to happily accept a burden that makes it harder to produce the products that made it popular in the first place.
I’m disappointed the EU won’t be getting these features (at least not quickly) but I’m hoping the citizenry realizes who’s to blame here
Apple managed to get approvals for medical devices and studies (highly regulated everywhere), custom radios and satellite communication (highly regulated everywhere).
Apple already has machine translation, voice recognition, voice recording, and dictation features shipped in the EU.
But when EU hurt Apple's ego by daring to demand to give users freedom to run software they want on devices they bought (that could break them out of a very lucrative duopoly), Apple suddenly is a helpless baby who cannot find a way to make a new UI available in the EU.
Or really the headphones actively register and send data outside of the EU. There's been some pushback recently on this front (ie. recent MSFT case [1]) since it's a known fact in the field that the approved 2023 EU-US DPF is basically BS, as it doesn't really address the core issues for which US companies were deamed not-compatible with GDPR.
[1] https://www.senat.fr/compte-rendu-commissions/20250609/ce_co...
For the EU, the issue is that Apple intends to recoup this investment through premium-pricing a different product in another category - one that has many low-cost competitors.
Wouldn't this best be resolved by productising the Apple LLM? Earphone API becomes open, as required by EU. However, use of the Apple LLM would be controlled by license. Earbud competitors could either license Apple's LLM, perhaps on a FRAND basis, or they could install their own LLM on an iOS device. Apple may bundle its LLM but must allow users to uninstall Apple's LLM, to free up space for alternatives.
In short, this isn't and shouldn't be about access to IOS for earbuds. EU is right in this. It's about monetising access to the Apple LLM, for which Apple deserves a revenue stream.