WWDC 2025: Apple Builds Live Translation into Phone and FaceTime

On June 9, 2025, Apple unveiled iOS 26 at its WWDC25 developer conference, and one of the most watched features was Live Translation: deeply integrated into Messages, FaceTime and Phone — texts show bilingually as you type, video calls display live translated captions, and phone calls translate speech in real time. Everything runs on on-device Apple Intelligence models; call content never needs to leave for the cloud.

Compared with last year's Apple Intelligence writing tools, Live Translation goes a step deeper: it is no longer "a translation app" but part of the communications infrastructure. With cross-language communication native to calls and video, the "infrastructuralization" of consumer translation is essentially complete.

For the language services industry, this continues a familiar logic: consumer features cover daily communication; professional services hold high-value scenarios. Apple's privacy architecture remains noteworthy — on-device processing means sensitive conversations never leave the device, a design philosophy aligned with enterprise language services' data-security requirements.

From Samsung to Apple, the phone giants' race in translation features is fundamentally a race to deliver the AI-era vision of "barrier-free communication". For professional linguists, every consumer feature release is public education — the more people get used to "simple translation at hand", the better they can tell that "important translation takes professionals".