English and Arabic, spoken both ways
You speak English and hear Arabic. They speak Arabic and hear English. Out loud, in both directions, on a call or sitting at the same table. This page covers what makes this particular pair harder than most, what the tools already on your phone do and do not cover, and what to test before you rely on any of them.
Written by the team behind VivaLingua. Claims about Apple's and Google's products come from their own documentation, dated at the bottom.
Start with the thing nobody mentions
Most advice about translation apps is written as though every language pair behaves the same way. English and Arabic do not, for two reasons that matter before you pick anything.
Arabic is not one spoken language
Modern Standard Arabic is the written and formal register, shared across the Arab world. Everyday speech is regional: Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, Iraqi, Maghrebi, and many more, differing enough that speakers from opposite ends sometimes converge on Modern Standard to be sure of each other.
Automatic speech recognition is a different problem in that setting than it is for a language with one dominant spoken standard. VivaLingua offers Arabic as a single language option rather than per-dialect ones, so the honest advice is: try a short call before you depend on it for something that matters. That applies to every tool on this page, not just ours.
The script runs the other way
Arabic is written right to left, so on-screen captions have to render in Arabic script and in the correct direction. VivaLingua shows captions in Arabic during the call, alongside the spoken translation, and the app interface itself is available in Arabic.
You say Hello, how are you? They hear مرحباً، كيف حالك؟
What FaceTime and Google Meet cover
One of them covers Arabic as text. Neither speaks it.
FaceTime does not cover Arabic at all. Its Live Translation shows translated captions on one-to-one calls, on devices running Apple Intelligence, and the list is English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Arabic is not on it.
Google Meet covers Arabic, but only in writing. Meet has two separate features, and the difference between them is this whole page. Its translated captions handle around 70 spoken languages, Arabic among them, on Business Standard plans and above. Its speech translation — the one that actually produces a voice — covers English paired with Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian. Arabic is not on that second list. Google has announced a model covering more than 70 languages for speech, in private preview for enterprise accounts, which would change this; it has not shipped broadly, and "announced" is not something you can hold a conversation on tonight.
So you can read Arabic in Meet. You cannot hear it. That is a real difference if the point of the call is a conversation rather than a transcript: reading subtitles while someone waits is not the same as talking to them. It also means paying for a per-seat business plan, which is an odd thing to ask of a relative who just wants to talk to you.
What VivaLingua does for this pair
Spoken, in both directions
Each person speaks their own language and hears the other in theirs, out loud, with captions on screen as well. Nobody is reading subtitles at each other, and nobody has to pass a phone back and forth.
Arabic with any of the other 41, not just English
All 42 call languages translate directly to one another rather than routing through English. Arabic to Thai, Arabic to Urdu, Arabic to Spanish: none of those detour through a third language, which matters because routing compounds errors and because plenty of conversations have no English speaker in them at all.
The other person pays nothing
Only the host spends minutes, bought in advance and never expiring — 30 for $2.99, 60 for $4.99, 120 for $8.49. Your relatives do not need a subscription, a Google account or a particular brand of phone. They install the app and join. If you are the one calling family overseas, this is usually the part that decides whether the call happens at all.
It still works when you are there
Visits end the call and start the harder conversation: the family lunch, the in-laws, the four people talking at once. The same app handles face-to-face and in-person groups of two to four, so the tool does not stop being useful the moment you land.
Before you rely on it
Test with a real conversation, not a demo sentence. Speech recognition behaves differently on careful speech than on how people actually talk. Five minutes with the person you will really be calling tells you more than any page, including this one.
Everything needs a connection. Speech recognition and translation both run in the cloud, so Wi-Fi or mobile data is required at both ends. Nothing here works on a plane.
Both of you install the app. There is no way to join from a browser link today. If the person you are calling will not install anything, a link-based tool will serve you better, and we would rather say so here than have you find out mid-call.
When this is the wrong tool
If you need Arabic translation inside a meeting already running on Meet, Zoom or Teams, VivaLingua hosts its own call and is not a plugin. If you need a specific regional dialect handled reliably rather than Arabic broadly, test it first and judge for yourself. And if what you actually need is a document translated rather than a conversation held, a text translator will do a more accurate job than any live system.
Related reading
Does FaceTime or Google Meet already translate your calls? — the same comparison without the Arabic focus.
All 42 call languages, with native names. The FAQ covers how the translation works and what happens to your audio.
Try it on your next call
Pay as you go. Guests always join free.