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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.

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?

Or both.

If they wanted to have this in the EU, they would've. Not going to blame brussels for the dirt that apple is throwing at my face.

My understanding is that this works on-device (via the iPhone), so I wonder what the regulatory issue is.

Perhaps the regulations treat is as if you’re “recording” the person you’re speaking with, without their consent?

Quite clearly the EU DMA.

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_...

Note that Samsung has been offering the same feature for at least a year by now. On device LLM. And also restricted to working only on Samsung branded BT headsets for no reason.

I hope you really do not want a future like this.

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...

I am in awe. Their cookie banners were consistently annoying but probably didn’t hurt any individual this much. If I were an EU resident I would probably learn about “you can just do things” from this.

So it wont work in Europe where its needed most ?

What else is it going to do ? Translating Californian to New York English ? Help with ordering from Taipei-Palace ?

should disneyland also be required to reserve spaces for competing attractions?

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.

if I have a US account and I travel to the EU, that should work?

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.

What about UK now that we’re not part of the EU anymore

most likely the reason is apple not providing the same access for 3rd party developers. Last year had similar idea to implement and there is not way to enable programmatically to have airpods mic as input and iphone speaker as output. Audio input/output routing on iOS overall is very limited comparing MacOS - similar if you want to use headset mic and phone speaker or vice versa.

Over time, the value proposition of Apple devices in the EU will be less, and less differentiated vs competition, which will make them either lose their premium appeal or market share (or both). In the long run, Apple will likely reconsider.

The EU only exports regulations these days.

As an EU resident I strongly get the feeling Apple is using this slow release of new features to try and sway the public opinion in the direction that “EU law is blocking innovation”.

I’m an Apple user since mac OS8 and I’m fully immersed in the apple ecosystem system. But my next phone will be an android.

Apple is as petty as a little girl. They are "punishing" their users for the EU regulations in an attempt to get leverage by getting their users to complain at their representative against the regulations.

Not only is this disingenuous but also incredibly stupid. They are using their users just like parents would in a divorce to get leverage. As if the kids had anything to do with the parents' issues and had enough power to make a difference.

Even if their customers were to loudly complain, the regulations do not apply to just Apple, so they are asking for preferential treatment in return. Other companies have been able to offer similar features to their customers while complying with the regulations just fine, why can't Apple do it?

The good thing is that they make it easy to not buy and not recommend their devices to anyone in the EU, no matter how good their technology gets. Their features were already often requiring a new device purchase (even when there was no technological need) but now they are also locking stuff because of politics.

What about Switzerland? Although not in the EU, it often inherits such regulation

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.

This decision triggers me because in the EU we sell cars that can go twice as fast as the speed limits, which could be very dangerous if used improperly, yet we ban technologies that are harmless and facilitate everyday life

LOL, I'm sorry but this is a perfect example of the difference in approaches between the US and Europe

Another issue with Apple and I’m a fully invested die hard. 25 years now. But this is taking too far, I might start looking somewhere else. Fuck this.

What are the alternatives?

Since it’s on device - it probably sucks anyway

I made an account just to jump in here because this debate infuriates me every time I see it. So basically all the stuff that makes apple devices actually measurably better has to be opened up so that some rando can make a half hacked together attempt at compatibility? For what? So that people have even more rubbish e-waste to choose from?

Apple's main strength is their flawless ecosystem, everything made by apple works perfectly with everything else made by apple.

My airpods switch seamlessly between my apple devices, my watch unlocks all my stuff, my phone can be used as a camera and mic for my macbook, all of my devices besides my earbuds can be used to pay for things. All of it works completely seamlessly, no annoying popups, no dialog boxes, no asking for permission ten million times, no random disconnects. Literally no friction at all, once a new device is set up it's done. This frictionless-ness needs Apple's proprietary modifications to standards to function and it needs Apple's devices to be individually secure and all of these seamless connections need to also be secure.

If users want that then they buy apple.

If users want the spam ridden garbage hole that is Google's Play Store, or the terrible jamming of Android into poor quality cheap devices or the rubbish quality of most consumer tech in general then they can buy whatever they want but I don't want $10 aliexpress smartwatches to be able to seamlessly connect to my phone. I don't want random bluetooth earbuds from the petrol station to be able to access an API that lets them send transcripts of my calls anywhere they like and I definitely don't want a low barrier to entry for devices that can airdrop me stuff or paste to my macbook if I'm out and about.

Mybe Apple should just lock it's devices down so that they only work with other Apple devices full stop. Then there wouldn't be a market for compatible devices to compete in. I'd be happy because I have never once bought a non-apple device that I care about connecting to my phone. I'd have to buy a new monitor but that's ok.

All consumer tech right now is literally rebadges or mild modificatioins of stuff from AliExpress and I don't want that in my nice clean ecosystem. If these competitors want to actually compete then how about they make something that's actually better in some way instead of just hamfistedly copying whatever Apple comes up with? Live translation exists on google devices, if you want non-apple accessories and live translation then just buy a pixel and pixel buds? Nobody forces anyone to buy into apple's ecosystem.

I have switched between ecosystems multiple times and every single time I ended up back with Apple since I bought my first iPhone 5 back when they were new. The issues that android and windows devices have far outweigh the cost of Apple lockin. Especially for someone who just wants their devices to work as what they are and doesn't care about tinkering with them.

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?)

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.

Just add another cookie banner before each session and you'll be fine, Apple.

spitting-drink-out-laughing.gif

but how would these airpods really be able to know you're in the EU? this should be easily hackable

I mean studying a technology with this scale to assess its impact before allowing it freely is… not terrible?

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

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.

Generally regulations should be enacted as a response to something major going wrong in the market. But the EU regulates before there’s even a single product on the market. How do you want to regulate AI if the technology completely changes every six months and nobody knows for sure where it’s going?

It makes sense that increased regulation will delay feature release. This is a trade off that Europeans seem fine with. Seems fine to me.

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.