At its Apple Event 2024 which took place earlier this month, Apple announced that the AI-powered Translate app will be available on watchOS 11, allowing Apple Watch users to access machine translation (MT) directly from their wrist. This comes as a practical tool for travelers, language learners, and professionals — marking an important moment in mobile translation.

According to the company’s website, users can “see a translation simply by typing or dictating a phrase. You can play the translation out loud and slow it down if need be. And you can use the Translate app on your watch without your iPhone when you have a Wi-Fi or cellular connection.”

According to Apple support, “When you travel to a location with a language that’s different from your Apple Watch, Translate appears as a suggested widget in the Smart Stack.” Users can even save favorite translations and review translations when the app detects multiple meanings for a word (such as words with gender variations).

The app includes support for translation between any combination of Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

The Translate app can also operate offline on older version of the Apple Watch — such as Series 9, Series 10, and Ultra models — which have sufficient storage to download up to 20 language models for offline use.

At the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Senior Director of watchOS Engineering David Clark explained the benefits of communicating via the company’s smartwatch. “With Apple Watch, you can have quick and meaningful interactions right on your wrist, making it so easy to stay connected to the world around you and the people you care about.”

According to a TechCrunch article, Apple also revealed other AI enhancements to its smartwatch at the event, including automatically reordering widgets and curating photos.