Microsoft Edge Can Now Translate Video — But There's a Big Catch

The latest beta version of Microsoft Edge includes an experimental feature for translating video audio in real-time. Tucked away in the settings under "Suggest video translation on supported sites", this new option adds a floating toolbar during playback on certain platforms once enabled. Right now, the functionality is pretty limited. It only supports translation to and from three languages: English, Spanish, and Korean, and website support is minimal — so far, it only works reliably on YouTube.

The biggest drawback is the steep hardware requirement. Because it relies on AI-powered neural translation, the feature needs at least 12GB of RAM to function. That kind of hunger for resources is a problem even for modern systems with 16GB, especially since Windows 11 itself uses about 4GB of RAM in the background. When you're playing a video with translation on, the browser can effectively hog all available memory, which might cause other applications to stutter.

In testing, the translation kicked in with almost no delay, but we noticed some quirks. In one Spanish video featuring a single speaker, the AI occasionally generated two separate audio tracks — one male and one female — likely because it was tricked by changes in the speaker's vocal tone. This preview feature is rolling out gradually to users on Edge's beta channel for Windows 11. There's no word yet on when it might land in the browser's stable release.

Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to overhaul other parts of Edge. The company recently announced it's ditching its own PDF engine entirely in favor of one from Adobe, which should significantly improve handling PDF files.

This new translation tool is a cool demo of the potential for AI in browsers, but its current implementation is really only for high-end systems. Developers will need to optimize its resource consumption and significantly expand the list of supported languages and platforms for it to go mainstream. That said, given that the feature is primarily aimed at viewing foreign-language content, and considering that YouTube is working on a similar in-platform feature, one has to wonder about its long-term necessity.