Canva’s Magic Switch tool translates presentations in 100 languages in seconds

Canva just announced a huge upgrade to its AI offerings with Magic Studio, a one-stop-shop for generative AI content creation. But what caught our eye was its language translation that works across projects — especially when founder Melanie Perkins gave an impromptu live demonstration.

This functionality is part of the new Magic Switch tool. Canva refers to this as an “industry first” offering that lets you instantly change designs into different formats with a single click.

Image: Canva

For example, you could turn a presentation into a blog post or an executive summary.

Perkins spoke about how Canva has been using it in-house to turn brainstorming sessions into something easily understandable and usable after the fact.

“Usually taking a whiteboard like this is usually quite an arduous process of turning that into something that’s consumable and digestible,” Perkins said.

“But with Magic Switch, they’re able to click Magic Switch and turn their whiteboard into a blog post in literally a click. Hours of busy work is turned into seconds.”

Canva’s language translation is the best thing about this

But the real kicker was that Magic Switch also lets you translate all of this into another language almost instantly.

I had questions about this, which I threw into the Q&A during a media briefing call. I was particularly interested in how many languages it covered and how accurate it was. There are quite a few translation tools out there already, and they vary in quality.

Rather than wait until the end of the briefing, Perkins picked up on my question just a few minutes after I asked.

“Does anyone speak a second language on the call right now? I’m in Magic Switch right now,” Perkins said.

A fellow journalist suggested Hindi.

“Okay, let’s do Hindi. I’m going to click translate and then in just a few seconds it will take this media briefing and turn it into Hindi,” Perkins said as she demonstrated this live, and the letters transformed.

“My Hindi itself is not very great, but hopefully on the call that do, you can start to see how this presentation is all of a sudden in Hindi. Is that looking alright, Hindi speakers on the call?”

There were several responses to the affirmative.

“This is amazing, loved it,” one person said.

“Amazing indeed,” said another.

A similar thing happened when there were requests for Bengali and Indonesian.

“So much better than G-Translate,” one of the participants said.

Image: Canva

Perkins went on to explain why this feature was such a boon for businesses.

“It’s really exciting for the workplaces with a lot of different speakers and for global campaigns as well.”

And this certainly makes sense. As the world becomes smaller and more businesses work with individuals or teams in multiple countries — features like this will be invaluable.

While it is unlikely to be perfect, it’s a great step towards inclusivity within multi-lingual workplaces as well as saving a ton of time in the process.