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Google engineer here. Did you see the demo? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc28VzAFBHw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc28VzAFBHw Yes, the Google Translate a

Google engineer here. Did you see the demo? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc28VzAFBHw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc28VzAFBHw Yes, the Google Translate app has a conversation mode which doesn't require a headset at all. I wouldn't recommend trying to use it with an unsupported headset, though. You won't be able to do push-to-talk, and the audio routing won't work as intended. (The intended UX is that one side of the conversation is routed to the phone, the other to Pixel Buds.) I wrote about why we decided not to support third party headsets here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15404918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15404918

hackerews 9y ago
That's cool. I still think the primary issue is the marketing makes it sound like the ear buds are bringing new tech to make this experience possible, when they're really bringing: a) UX for "hold while talking" b) Known quality of the headset From the outside, it looks a bit shady, and a bit un-Googlelike just to compete with Apple. I imagine a more Google-like approach would've been to release Translate as a local model (eg like https://developers.google.com/vision/ https://developers.google.com/vision/). It's easy to imagine the community would quickly figure out a way to solve a) and make the experience work for most headsets.