Natural multilingual communication is a cornerstone of successful international teams and partnerships. However, language barriers in virtual meetings can lead to friction, miscommunication, lost sales, and lost productivity. Google has announced a game-changing solution: real-time speech translation in Google Meet is now generally available for businesses.
Dubbed Audio: The Evolution of Meeting Inclusivity
You’re likely familiar with translated captions, which display text in your preferred language, and which have been available in Meet for some time. Meet’s new Speech Translation takes this much further. Using advanced real-time speech-to-speech technology, this feature delivers a dubbed audio translation of the conversation.
The translated audio is dubbed over the original speech, mimicking the speaker's tone and speaking cadence, preserving nuance. By maintaining the emotional context and making it easier to distinguish who is speaking, your team can follow the conversation’s natural flow without the distraction of reading subtitles.
Real-Time Translation Unlocks Global Productivity
For businesses operating across borders and in different languages, this update is a massive leap forward for meeting effectiveness. You can bring together international teams, vendors, and clients without the need for dedicated interpreters, cutting down on costs and time.
It also allows for faster onboarding and internal communication. You can onboard employees in other countries with one-on-one training from head office, have global calls with internal teams to introduce new products - the possibilities are endless.
Getting Started With Google Meet Real-Time Translation
Speech translation is available to Google Workspace customers on select plans, including Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, and Enterprise Plus, among others.
At launch, the feature supports bidirectional translation between English and five key languages: Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian. Google will be rolling out more language support and feature enhancements in the coming months.
To make sure everyone can take advantage of it at your organization, have your Google administrators enable Gemini for Meet as laid out in this support article from Google. You will also have to let individual users know that they are responsible for initiating translation during a meeting, and that when they do the people in the meeting will see that the meeting is being translated. The controls to enable translation are easily accessible in Meet.
You should use some caution with speech translation in meetings. While it is as close to accurate as possible, you may want to stick with old-school interpreters for anything involving financial, legal, medical, or similar business to ensure that the translations are 100% accurate.
While AI translation has grown exponentially in its capabilities in the past few years, especially with Gemini’s newer models, it still isn’t at the level of a human interpreter. It is, however, still extremely useful for internal meetings, international sales calls, and anything else that can move your business forward in other languages.
If you want your business to start communicating globally, and you’re not on Google Workspace yet, now is the time. Live translation in Google Meet is just the start of how AI powers your everyday productivity when you’re in the Google ecosystem. Contact us today to find out more.
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