Getting started

• Put the phone between you. The top half is turned to face the other person.
• Tap a language name to choose it — each person picks their own.
• Whoever is talking taps the microphone on their side; tap it again to stop. Once it's on, tap Auto and the phone switches sides by itself when someone pauses.
• Tap any sentence to hear it read aloud. Tap your own sentence to fix a word the phone misheard.

Using it offline

Open Settings → Offline Languages and download both languages before you travel. After that, everything works in Airplane Mode. Translation models are shared with Apple's Translate app.

iPhone Duo

Open the phone: you read the inner display and the other person reads the outer display, in their language — both of you can tap. iOS lets apps use the outer display only while the camera is on, so Face2Face turns the camera on just for that; nothing is shown, recorded or saved. If you prefer not to, turn off Settings → Use the Outer Display and the inner display shows both sides. Closed, the app works on the outer display like on any phone.

Big captions

Tap the captions button for large, high-contrast captions in one language — for someone hard of hearing, a noisy room or a mask. Pinch to resize, hold to pause, swipe up to clear, and tap the keyboard to type something to be read aloud.

Languages

Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin), Cantonese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese, using Apple's on-device models. Cantonese is recognized natively and translated as Traditional Chinese, so some colloquial words may come out less accurately.

It doesn't hear me

• Check Settings → Face2Face: Microphone and Speech Recognition must be on.
• Keep your fingers off the microphones and speak towards the phone.
• If a language shows "Not available on this phone", your device has no on-device model for it — you can still type.