Google Meet is adding real-time speech translation on Android and iOS.

On the surface, it sounds like a feature.

In reality, it’s something bigger:

language is slowly becoming infrastructure.

For most of human history, language was a boundary:

• you learned it

• you struggled through it

• you lived inside its limits

But real-time translation changes the shape of communication itself.

Not because it’s perfect today.

But because the direction is irreversible:

speech → meaning → speech

The medium disappears.

And once language becomes a background layer, a few things follow:

• international collaboration becomes default

• customer support becomes borderless

• education becomes less gated

• culture spreads faster than policy can react

This isn’t just “AI helping meetings.”

It’s the early stage of a world where:

understanding is no longer tied to shared vocabulary.

The question is not if this will scale.

The question is:

What happens when the first generation grows up assuming translation is automatic?

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