Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Wednesday, May 21st. I'm Victoria Craig for the Wall Street Journal.

Lost in translation, a problem of the past? At least, that's the aim of a new AI service from Google. We'll take it for a spin.

Then, the global tech industry is dominated by American heavyweights.

We'll explain what's holding back Europe.

But first, live, real-time translations are usually reserved for important, large-scale events

like press conferences from world leaders or speeches at the United Nations. That's

because it involves an interpreter speaking in real time. But yesterday, Google announced that

kind of service is now available for Google Meet video chats. Subscribers of the company's

advanced Gemini AI can access it for $20 a month. And rather than just dubbing your voice with the native

human speakers, Google system mimics your voice to speak in the listener's language. Our personal

tech columnist, Nicole Nguyen, tried it out. Where would you like to go on your next vacation?

Well, I can tell you about an upcoming vacation that I'm taking to Spain, to

Mallorca, no, Nicole doesn't speak Spanish, but it did sound an awful lot likeer, didn't it?

And that's the point. Nicole joins me now from just outside Google's developers conference in Mountain View, California. Nicole, it sounded like you were speaking fluent Spanish there, but you obviously weren't. What did you make of that?

I was creeped out. It does sound a lot like me. I felt like my Spanish alter ego jumped out of the screen and was looking at me in

the face. And when I showed it to my colleagues, my boss, who I've worked with for the past five

years and my husband, they were like, whoa, it sounds like you are speaking Spanish. Okay, so it sounds

authentic. It even gives you like a native Spanish accent, but how accurate were the

translations? So I showed this video clip to my colleague who is a native Spanish speaker, and she was

like, the beginning kind of sounds like gibberish. There was a rough start. Some words are stuttered,

and I think that the translation tech, the AI that's powering this

technology, was trying to catch up. You know, it's trying to predict what I'm trying to say

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