AirPods Live Translation Blocked for EU Users
Apple says on its feature availability webpage that “Apple Intelligence: Live Translation with AirPods” won’t be available if both the user is physically in the EU and their Apple Account region is in the EU. Apple doesn’t give a reason for the restriction, but legal and regulatory pressures seem the most plausible culprits.
In particular, the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) both impose strict requirements for how speech and translation services are offered. Regulators may want to study how Live Translation works, and how that impacts privacy, consent, data-flows, and user rights.
This implies that it’s not because of DMA-related antitrust concerns. I would have expected those to come into play since, as far as I’m aware, live translation doesn’t work with headphones from other brands.
Previously:
- AirPods Pro 3
- Apple Appeals EU Digital Markets Act Interoperability Rules
- Apple Intelligence Available in EU
- Apple Delays “More Personalized Siri” Apple Intelligence Features
- Questioning EU Geo-Blocking Restrictions
- iOS Apple Intelligence in EU in April 2025
- No Apple Intelligence or iPhone Mirroring in EU at Launch
Update (2025-09-25): Kyle Howells:
DMA is the first good suggestion I’ve heard behind why this might not be in the EU.
Doesn’t work with other headphones and doesn’t work with other translation services (Google Translate can’t opt-in to providing the translations).
This is kind of a funny limitation because fully half the languages Live Translation works with — French, German, and Spanish — are the versions spoken in their respective E.U. countries and not, for example, Canadian French or Chilean Spanish. As written, the most impressive implementation of this feature only works if both parties are outside the E.U. or, if they are within the E.U., neither has an E.U. Apple Account.
Previously:
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How can these pesky European commies expect a god-tier feature such as live translate (that has been available on the competition for years) to work with lowly third party headphones???? Fucking communist fascists [/gruber]
Apple Intelligence: Live Translations in Phone and FaceTime -> French (France) (no "- not available in the EU)
Apple Intelligence: Live Translation with AirPods -> French (France) - not available in the EU
Apple, the art of consistency.
Work each passing year I become more and more grateful for GDPR.
I love clicking on the Block All button after seeing a list of 300+ vendors that would like to track me.
You can easily buy live translate headphones in the EU: https://amzn.eu/d/0LwIMa4 a family member that struggles with English bought these recently and they work OK
Dutch news site Tweakers.net has a statement from Apple where they point to the Digital Markets Act (DMA) for blocking this feature in the EU: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/239120/apple-brengt-livevertalingen-met-airpods-vooralsnog-niet-in-eu-uit-vanwege-dma.html
I think (if this is DMA related) it is likely related to interoperability. No other bluetooth headphone maker can integrate with Apple's on device translation service in the same way, giving Apple a competitive advantage that is leveraging the iPhone's dominance to sell AirPods in what is likely an anticompetitive way. Generally I think that the EU is right on this, if you want to run your translation model on the phone and just have the headphones be a basic microphone and speaker interface you can't only apple gets permission to do that... Theoretically any headphone maker could use the BLE interface to do this but Apple would have to allow the BLE headphones to launch a background translation service (which they allow themselves to do).
The other interoperability aspect is allowing the use of other translation services, such as Google Translate or even something like ChatGPT. And because Apple's translation service supports so few languages, I think support for other services would actually make this feature (and thus AirPods) more interesting for many consumers.
