Optus · Nov 2015–Aug 2018
Call
Translate
The world’s first AI-powered real-time voice translation on a standard phone call — built on Google Cloud, deployed across the Optus network.
The world’s first AI-powered real-time voice translation on a standard phone call — built on Google Cloud, deployed across the Optus network.
Australia is one of the most linguistically diverse countries on earth — more than 300 languages spoken, with large communities of Arabic, Mandarin, Italian, Greek, Vietnamese and Hindi speakers for whom English is a second language. Yet the phone call, unchanged in its fundamentals for over a century, assumed both parties spoke the same language.
The opportunity was to apply AI and cloud language processing to make voice calls work across language barriers — in real time, on a standard phone call, with no special hardware and no change to how either party dialled.
The team began exploring in-call translation as early as 2016 under the internal name Optus.ai. The concept was demonstrated at Red Hat Summit Boston in 2019 as Voice Genie. The core technical breakthrough was abstracting Optus’s underlying telecoms infrastructure — virtualising network functions into containers distributed across telephone exchanges — and integrating Google Cloud’s natural language processing APIs directly into the call path.
Voice traffic was transcribed, translated via Google Cloud Translation APIs, and returned as audio in near real-time — all within a standard Optus voice call. The user simply enabled Call Translate in the My Optus App, selected their language pair, and called as normal.
Google Cloud described this as the first deployment of its Conversational AI technology within a live telco call path at this scale.
Call Translate launched as a beta trial in June 2021, initially supporting 10 languages. More than 1,200 people joined the beta, with translated calls ranging from a few minutes to over an hour. Italian, Mandarin, Vietnamese and Hindi were among the most-used language pairs.
By August 2022 the service expanded to 19 languages at full launch, adding French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Punjabi, Thai, Turkish and more. It was covered by technology media internationally and positioned Optus as a genuine pioneer in applied AI.