Google is bringing more AI features to Translate

Do you remember Google Translate? Before AI Overviews and other instant answers, Google Translate was the place we were all going to whenever we needed to engage with a foreign language. It also remained one of the rare Google services untouched by AI for a long time, until Live Translation was added last year. And now, Google is bringing additional AI features to Translate.

Google announced new Gemini-powered features for its Translate app on Android and iOS. According to Google, these new AI features are “designed to help you nail the tone of any conversation — from informal hangouts to professional meetings — when it matters most.”

New features should help you with idioms and colloquial expressions that aren’t part of official dictionaries. For example, if you ask it to translate a phrase like “It’s raining cats and dogs” to another language, it will find a matching expression in that language instead of translating literally.

The Translate app will get two new tabs where you can ask Gemini to give you more info about an expression you want to translate and ask follow-up questions. Once you enter a phrase for translation, you can tap the “Understand” tab, and Gemini will tell you everything you need to know about it. There’s also the “Ask” tab, where you can ask questions in natural language. For example, you can ask Gemini, “What’s the best way to say ‘beating a dead horse’ in Spanish?” and it will tell you the appropriate expression.

Gemini features are already available in the Translate app in the U.S. and India on Android and iOS, and are coming soon to the web.

Google Translate currently supports 249 languages, while Gemini supports over 100 languages for text generation and understanding. So, you won’t be able to use the AI features with every language on Google Translate, but the majority of the world’s languages are covered.

Source: Google

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Posted Friday 27 February 2026 at 12:04 pm AEST (my time).

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