Gemini dropped simultaneous interpretation (ft. Will the foreign language study market survive?)

Introducing Gemini's speech-to-speech translation capabilities - YouTube

The old method using TTS had delay, so they went multimodal: skipping TTS for direct voice-to-voice simultaneous translation. This is the start of a world where you just pop in earbuds and instantly get simultaneous interpretation... It might suck right now, but considering ChatGPT only dropped 3 years ago, what will the world look like in 5 years? If it gives interpreter-level simultaneous interpretation just by plugging in earbuds, will anyone still want to learn a foreign language? It’s like wondering if the personal training market will survive now that Wegovy is here.... I'm not talking about the current level of tech; I'm curious if people will still make huge investments in learning foreign languages, and if being fluent will still be "the hype," even if perfect tech is here in 5 years.