While the Pixel Buds aren’t the best headphones on the market, they drew a lot of attention when announced thanks to the real-time translation feature showed off during the Made by Google event last year. Now it seems Google has expanded the feature to include all Assistant enabled headphones on all Android Phones.
Previously the feature required a Pixel or Pixel 2 phone, but the requirement has seemingly been removed in an update to the Google Support page which now reads:
Google Translate is available on all Assistant-optimized headphones and Android phones.
There’s been an influx of new Assistant enabled headphones in the past 12 months, including models from Bose, LG, JBL, Sony and more. The feature even apparently works on the USB-C Pixel Bud style earbuds included in the Pixel 3/3 XL box.
The translations using Google Translate and the Pixel Buds aren’t perfect, as we saw in the on-stage demo at the launch, but it worked well enough.
If you have a pair of Google Assistant enabled headphones, fire them up and give this a try.
