[makeitdouble]

It's understating the lag. Faster will always be better, but even "real time" still requires the other person to complete their sentence before getting a translation (there is the edge case of the other language having similar grammatical structure and word order, but IMHO that's rare), and you catch up from there. That's enough lag to warrant putting the whole translation process literally on the table.

I see the real improvements in the models, for IRL translation I just think phones are very good at this and improving from there will be exponentially difficult.

IMHO it's the same for "bots" intervening (commenting/reacring on exchanges etc.) in meetings. Interfacing multiple humans in the same scene is always a delicate problem.