Google revealed an upgrade to its translation app that can transcribe speech at an event held at its San Francisco offices to showcase its latest work on artificial intelligence (via The Verge and CNET). This currently only works with audio that you are recording live. This would work great in common situations like lectures, interviews, or voice memos. If you already have a recorded audio file, you can always play it back aloud and have the app transcribe it.

Of course, since it is Google Translate, you can swap between languages, such as French, German, Spanish, etc. The app continuously re-evaluates sentences as it listens, changing punctuation and words according to context and the speaker's accent.

We have seen this technology before in Google's Recorder app, which debuted with the Pixel 4. With automatic on-device transcription and voice-activated search capabilities, the app became one of the best parts of the phone and seriously made one of our iPhone-loving writers jealous.

Android phones other than the Pixel could also get the recorder app by secretly downloading it, but not all devices could use all the features, so the extent to which this workaround worked depended largely on the phone's brand.

Unlike Recorder, however, according to The Verge, you probably need to maintain an Internet connection while Translate is transcribing.

As CNET cites, there is no indication of when Google will push this update other than to make it available to the general public "in the coming months." Assuming it works as intended, however, this would be a long-awaited change to an already effective app.