Zoom has begun rolling out a beta version of its in-house AI live speech translation for meetings, several months after first previewing the capability at Zoomtopia 2025.
In September 2025, Zoom said “real-time voice translation” would arrive by year-end and help “reduce interpreter costs.”
As of April 2026, that capability has launched as a feature called Voice Translator, allowing meeting participants to speak in one language while others hear AI-generated speech in their preferred language.
Voice Translator currently supports five languages — English, Chinese, French, Japanese, and Spanish — and is available in beta only to paid Zoom customers on US-based accounts. The feature requires a Pro, Business, or Enterprise account and the Zoom Workplace desktop app (version 7.0.0 or higher) on Windows or macOS, and is not yet broadly available across devices or platforms.
During the 60-day free beta period, eligible users receive five hours of translation per 30 days, up to 10 hours total. After that, the feature is expected to transition to a paid add-on, signaling that Zoom sees speech translation as premium functionality rather than a standard collaboration feature.
Users can configure Voice Translator within the Zoom Workplace app during meetings, including selecting preferred spoken languages and interpreter personas.
Voice Translator appears to build on Zoom’s existing stack rather than replacing it. The company says “the feature integrates with existing translated captions technology,” converting translated text into synthetic speech. Documentation also notes that for longer stretches of uninterrupted speech, translated audio may only be delivered after the speaker pauses — suggesting an approach where translated captions are rendered into synthetic speech, rather than continuous simultaneous interpreting.
Zoom cautions that “translation quality may vary and evolve depending on language pair, audio quality, and speaker clarity,” underscoring that the feature remains in an early stage.
Zoom’s rollout comes as competition in AI live speech translation continues to build. Google Meet has already made its speech translation feature generally available for some business users and is rolling it out to mobile devices, while DeepL has introduced a broader voice translation offering — spanning meetings, conversations, and enterprise use cases — though its meeting integrations remain in early access.
