X

Amazon adds live translation feature for Echo devices

Alexa can act as your interpreter in real time.

Carrie Mihalcik Former Managing Editor / News
Carrie was a managing editor at CNET focused on breaking and trending news. She'd been reporting and editing for more than a decade, including at the National Journal and Current TV.
Expertise Breaking News, Technology Credentials
  • Carrie has lived on both coasts and can definitively say that Chesapeake Bay blue crabs are the best.
See full bio
Carrie Mihalcik
echo-show-8-10
Chris Monroe/CNET

Amazon on Monday launched a live translation feature for Echo speakers and smart displays that lets Alexa act as your interpreter. Once a translation session has started, Alexa can automatically identify what languages are being spoken and translate each side of the conversation, Amazon said in a blog post. 

"The Live Translation feature leverages several existing Amazon systems, including Alexa's automatic-speech-recognition (ASR) system, Amazon Translate, and Alexa's text-to-speech system, with the overall architecture and machine learning models designed and optimized for conversational-speech translation," the company said.

At launch, the feature will work with language pairs including English and Spanish, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese or Hindi.

See also: Best Alexa devices for 2020: Ring, Wyze and more

Watch this: Amazon's spherical smart speaker offers entertainment in the round