Translation earbuds capture speech, recognise the words, translate them and play the result back as synthetic audio, often within a few seconds. The technology could make cross-language conversations easier, but delays and translation mistakes mean it is not yet a substitute for fluent understanding or an interpreter.

The processing may happen on a connected phone, in the cloud or across both; some models can work offline, while others need internet access. Advertised accuracy rates of 95 or 99 per cent generally rely on ideal conditions, and real-world performance can suffer with background noise, unclear speech, dialects, slang, idioms or less common language pairs. Offline features and language availability vary by product.