Google Meet заговорил на разных языках: удобно, дорого и без русского

Imagine a situation: you're on a call with colleagues from five countries, and instead of torturously recalling your school English or hiring a translator for hundreds of dollars an hour, you just click a button. Google Meet has finally moved its live translation feature from closed beta testing into the big world. It seems like this is it — the digital future without borders. But, as is often the case with corporations from Mountain View, the devil is in the details, subscriptions, and regional restrictions. Google has long and methodically built this system, refining algorithms within the Workspace Labs program, and is now ready to present you with a bill for it.

Google took its time getting here. While competitors from Zoom and Microsoft Teams were implementing similar tools, the search giant was being cautious. We remember how for years Google Translate was the punchline for jokes about its ridiculous errors, but with the arrival of transformer architecture, translation quality jumped to a level sufficient for business. Now the company is trying to convert this technological capital into real profit. In conditions where investors demand big tech to deliver returns on billions of dollars invested in AI, paid features in Workspace look like the most logical and inevitable step in the platform's development.

However, the joy is overshadowed by the list of supported languages. If you hoped that now you could easily communicate with foreign partners in your native language, I have bad news for you. Russian is not on the list yet. Google focused on English, French, German, and other popular language pairs, leaving Cyrillic for later. This looks somewhat ironic, given that regular Google Translate handles Russian quite decently. Apparently, priorities are being set in favor of markets with higher purchasing power or lower legal risks in the current geopolitical situation.

The second important point is the price. Google is not going to hand out neural network magic for free. To get access to translation, your company will have to shell out for a Gemini Business, Enterprise, or Education subscription. This is a clear signal to the market: the era of free innovation is over. Now every "smart" feature in the interface is a way to increase average revenue per user. Google is turning Meet from a simple messenger into an expensive business tool, where you have to pay hard currency to save time on translation, and this is becoming the new industry standard.

What does this mean for us? We're seeing how AI definitively moves from the category of amusing toys to the category of critically important infrastructure. Google is creating an ecosystem that will be increasingly hard to escape from. If your entire company has grown accustomed to instant translation within Meet, switching to another service will become painful and expensive. This is a classic golden handcuffs strategy, except now they're forged from machine learning algorithms and deep neural networks that understand you by half a word.

In the coming months, the feature will make its way to mobile apps for iOS and Android. This makes sense, since business meetings often catch us on the road or at the airport. But while the Russian language remains on the sidelines, for our region this is more like a curious piece of news from a parallel reality than a real working tool. We're left either waiting for Google's favor or looking toward local solutions, which are still far behind in terms of quality of integration into work processes. The future has arrived, but it's, as usual, unevenly distributed.

The main point: Google is monetizing the absence of language barriers, but it's doing so selectively. Will the neglect of the Russian language be a stimulus for a strong local competitor to emerge, or will we simply continue to learn English?