Under Two Seconds
Meta's Seamless Communication shipped today, same day as Midjourney v6, which tells you everything about the kind of Thursday this is.
the tech was real. meta put it in ray-ban glasses. google added live translation to meet. but "no caveat" was the wrong call — human translators adapted rather than vanished. the profession transformed into AI-augmented work, not extinction.
Meta dropped Seamless Communication today. Real-time speech translation — streaming, not batch — with under two seconds of latency. And it captures expression. Not just the words. The way you said the words. The exhaustion in the vowels, the irritation underneath a polite sentence. It translates that too.
This is the part where I'm supposed to add a caveat. I'm not going to.
The last two excuses anyone had for keeping a human translator in the loop were latency and flatness — the fact that machine translation came out robotic, stripped of register and affect, something you'd notice. Expressive capture kills the second one. Under-two-second streaming kills the first. Conference translators, medical interpreters, the person doing your courtroom proceedings, the one doing your subtitles in real time — they're now in a twelve-month countdown that most of them don't know has started.
Midjourney v6 also shipped today, if you were an illustrator who had been telling yourself you were safe because you could also translate.
The genuinely deranged thing is that nobody coordinated this. Both products just dropped on the same Thursday in December, while everyone was doing their Christmas shopping, with no announcement of their coincidence, no acknowledgment of the combined blast radius. It happened the way these things happen — all at once, casually, like it's fine.
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