Amazon Alexa has brought a smart upgrade to Amazon Echo devices, gaining the ability to translate a series of languages on the fly.

The live translation update is now rolling out to Echo devices in the U.S. and can translate between English and Spanish, German, French, Hindi, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese. Translated phrases are played back as audio or displayed on screen as text on Echo Show devices.

Like the Google Assistant's translator with translation feature, Amazon's Live Translation works by recording audio, quickly translating it, and playing back the phrase via a voice assistant (in this case Alexa).

Using Live Translation is as simple as barking the following voice command at Alexa: "Alexa, translate French. Alexa will play a beep and you can begin speaking in any of the supported languages.

From there, Alexa translates what you say into the desired language and provides a live transcript of your conversation to the Echo device with display.

This would be a useful feature if you want to talk to a guest who doesn't speak your native language very well. Or if you simply want to learn another language.

Google's interpreter mode can translate live into a much wider variety of languages, but here are some differences that might give Alexa's new translation feature an edge.

For one, Amazon's Live Transcribe is designed with two-way conversations in mind, so it can translate both sides at once. Google's Interpreter Mode service is more focused on translating a single speaker and may not be as useful when trying to have a conversation.

Amazon accomplishes this by running two instances of its automatic speech recognition system simultaneously. According to Amazon's blog, this eliminates the need to manually restart the speech recognition model each time the speaker changes, and also reduces latency in providing translations.

In short, this is yet another feature that makes Amazon Alexa and Echo devices truly capable virtual assistants, rather than simple smart home gadgets for answering queries, controlling lighting, and playing music.