Gadget Claims To Fit In Your Ear and Translate Foreign Languages In Real-Time (telegraph.co.uk) 103
An anonymous reader cites a report on the Telegraph about a tiny gadget that lets two people who speak a different language understand each other. The gadget dubbed Pilot translates English, French, Spanish and Italian. Pilot, which is yet to be launched, is priced at $129. From the report: It works by being connected to two different people, speaking two different languages, and translates what they are saying in your ear. Pilot is supposedly the first 'smart earpiece' capable of translating between two languages. Waverly Labs, who have developed the technology, said on their website: "This little wearable uses translation technology to allow two people to speak different languages but still clearly understand each other." They have not said how it works except for that it uses "translation technology" embedded in an app. We have reached out to them to find out more.
HHGG (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:HHGG (Score:4, Funny)
Dammit. Beaten to the draw by TFA.
Don't worry; nobody will ever read it.
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Is it a babelfish?
No other name would fit better, regardless if only 10% of the population "gets it"...
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Probably a "cloudfish". Whatever you hear will be uploaded to a server, processed, and the translation downloaded and replayed. Then for the next week you will hear targeted adverts.
FTFY
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Sounds more like a Pilot Fish [wikipedia.org].
Uh, sure (Score:5, Funny)
"My hovercraft is full of eels..."
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Age Old Meme (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Google Translate
2) Bluetooth Headset
3) PROFIT!
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ChÃre tante, fixons si double le meurtrier effacer sélectionner tous
An app? (Score:3)
They have not said how it works except for that it uses "translation technology" embedded in an app.
So....it's really just an earpiece that connects to a device running a translation app? What did they do, just take speech-to-text input, run it through Google Translate, then output through a text-to-speech app?
Hungarian dictionnary! (Score:3)
Very likely. What could possibly go wrong?
My nipples explode in delight!
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Re: An app? (Score:1)
Google translate for android already does a lot of languages vocally, and you can even use your camera to translate words in an overlay of what you're pointing at in real time.
in what dialects?? (Score:3)
i would bet that it would explode trying to "translate" between say Southern (US) and Cockney (UK)
even with both of them being "English" dialects.
and does it work only 1 on 1 or will it translate between N persons??
Linguist game you have 4 base languages how long can you talk with the response being a DIFFERENT dialect of those base languages?
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I'm a native speaker. I spent a year in Australia and got use to all the Aussies, before leaving for NZ. I was like, "This won't be as bad. I'm sure I'll understand them fine."
The first day I was like, "OMG what the fuck is everyone saying I can'tunderstandanyofit!"
I was fine after two weeks .. mostly. There are still some people I can't understand...mostly from Hamilton :-P
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"I was fine after two weeks .. mostly. There are still some people I can't understand...mostly from Hamilton :-P"
That's because they're english.
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Hear them down in Soho Square, dropping aitches everywhere, speaking English any way they please.
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"Hear a yorkshireman or worse hear a cornishman converse I'd rather hear a choir singing flat."
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"What do you tike me for, a fool?"
My Fair Lady is one of my favorite movie musicals, even if it's Marni Nixon doing the singing for the Blessed Audrey. I had a cast album of a stage production starring Julie Andrews alongside Rex Harrison and it is made of PURE AWESOME, but I lost it in a flood. Of course we'd have got Julie instead of Audrey in the film, if it weren't for Mary Poppins. Damn you Disney!
"Pygmalion" is one of my favorite plays as well. We did a vocal reading of it in high school english
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i would bet that it would explode trying to "translate" between say Southern (US) and Cockney (UK) even with both of them being "English" dialects.
I could see this having problems even translating between Southern and West Coast American English. For example, the word "Dinner" means different things depending on location, as does "Cousin". The potential for misunderstanding is rather high.
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i would bet that it would explode trying to "translate" between say Southern (US) and Cockney (UK)
even with both of them being "English" dialects.
I could see this having problems even translating between Southern and West Coast American English. For example, the word "Dinner" means different things depending on location, as does "Cousin". The potential for misunderstanding is rather high.
As in "Cousin"/"Brother"/"Sister" could also mean spouse in some parts of the south? :P
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"Pants" For those unfamiliar, US pants == UK trousers and UK pants == US underwear. Subtle differences, but unending hilarity.
That's just the beginning.
UK knickers/pants = US panties
UK panties = US lingerie (sort of)
US knickers = UK ?? (golf trousers, i.e., short pants like boys wore in the 1920s)
US suspenders = UK braces
UK suspenders = US garters
US braces (i.e., for teeth) = UK brace
UK Garter (usually short for "Order of the Garter" or associated stuff) = US a high public honor
UK knock up = US wake someone up
US knock up = UK impregnate (often unintentionally)
I could go on; there's a lot of this nonsense...
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UK knock up = US wake someone up
US knock up = UK impregnate (often unintentionally)
This drunk girl slept with me and then I knocked her up.
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Is that you, Julian?
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As in the job title of "knocker-upper" - the person who would get up an hour or two earlier than the rest of the factory workers and go around the streets knocking everyone else up to make sure they got to the gates on time.
Seriously.
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Cor blimey guv, that'd be a rum do and no mistake me old china.
That's how rednecks talk, isn't it?
Fish and chips? (Score:1)
Just a wild guess.
Wow! A Star Trek.... (Score:2)
Universal Translator v 1.0
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Heh. Here's s'more Slashdot'esque rationale:
"This device isn't patentable because it's (inconsistently) portrayed on Star Trek."
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It fits comfortably in your ear... as long as you are a Ferengi.
Doesn't Google Translate already do this? (Score:1)
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The, err, benefit is that you can stick it in your ear.
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and, the chance to part with $250 US.
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$129. But in any case, I can offer you that opportunity right now! Just send $129 to Happy Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace...
My bullshit detector is going off (Score:5, Insightful)
* Unknown startup company
* Huge claims
* Big PR push
* IndieGogo campaign
Smart money says this either ships way late and barely functional, or never ships at all and the creator gets a nice new vacation home in France, Spain or Italy. Translating audio in real time is a fool's errand.
Pay attention the next time you're dictating using, say, Google's voice recognition, or you're watching automatically-generated closed captions on an unscripted TV show. (Sports commentary is a nice example.) You will *frequently* see the transcription change after the fact, replacing one or more words with others that are totally different.
If you claim to be transcribing and translating in anything approaching real time, that can't happen. Once you've said the wrong word, you've blown the meaning of the sentence. Correcting it in audio will take time, by which point you've missed (or are lagging further behind) the actual conversation. Or more likely (if this ever reaches market) your conversation is riddled with uncorrected errors and you have barely any understanding of what's actually being said.
I doubt it will ever even reach this point, though. Chances are good no product ever ships, but the money is taken regardless.
Re:My bullshit detector is going off (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My bullshit detector is going off (Score:4, Insightful)
Another for your list.
* A photo of the "app" that is so low re you can't see if it's even a translation app.
No, we don't (Score:2)
You are ignorant, or pretending for personal benefit. Language is not variable substitution, it is conceptual. The concepts are not unidirectional, they often run contrary. The company lying in TFA, and you, are attempting to pretend that language is nothing more than variable substitution. X => A, Y => B, Z => C, etc..
That in and of itself is a huge mountain to climb technically, but now stuff it all into voice recognition with all of the possible pronunciations and vocal differences/problems.
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Translating audio in real time is a fool's errand. ... you are 20 years behind ...
Erm
The biggest "known" project for natural language _voice_ translation was probably the Microsoft one, it got canceled.
It got not canceled because it is to hard, but because Bill Gates was pissed off.
Mr Gates visited the University of Karlsruhe, now KIT, in 1996 and gave a speech. The speech was translated and transcribed in realtime from english to german.
When Bill Gates asked afterwards how this was done Prof. Alex Waibel
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Japanese as an interims [sic, interlingua] language? I don't think so, at least I've never seen a system that did that. Citation? (See e.g. this 1998 paper, of which Alex Waibel is a co-author: isl.anthropomatik.kit.edu/cmu-kit/english/5633.php; no mention of Japanese as an interlingua; and the Kauers, Vogel, Fügen, and Waibel paper in INTERSPEECH, 2002 doesn't mention Japanese at all.) Claims that language X is better for clearly/ unambiguously depicting thought are usually made by native speakers o
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I have no citations. I only know first hand that the interims language is Japanese.
Could be basically any language that is similar.
In Japanese you can construct a sentence without the typical ambiguities we have in german or english.
Prof. Waibel is a good jap, speaker ... so it is natural that he used that as an interlingua.
As I said before: I worked at his department (as a unix guru, not at his projects). And at that time it was common talk that Japanese was the interlingua.
If you are interested in that s
And it can make claims, too (Score:2)
Gadget Claims
Surely the real news is that there is a now a gadget that is able to make claims about itself. Run! It's the singularity!
Comment removed (Score:3)
It *claims*? (Score:1)
"Hallo, I'm a gadget. I fit in your ear and translate foreign languages in real time."
Seriously, who writes these headlines?
(Note to self: Never anthropomorphize gadgets. They hate it when you do that.)
Uh, No. Context is everything. (Score:2)
In the presence of homonyms and synonyms you need context which means you need the full sentence before you can figure out what the words are.
We should sail, there is a sale on sails at Sail.
An example of conversation... (Score:4, Interesting)
So, I took a basic dialog and ran it through Google Translator, converting it from English to German, then taking the German and converting it back to English. Here's what I got...
Original Conversation:
Person A: Look at this amazing gadget! It allows me to hear what you're saying in German in English! Here's a spare. Put it in your ear, and you can hear my English and translate it to German!
Person B: Great! Now our different languages won't stop us from understanding each other!
A: Just imagine, with this, we can break down language barriers that interfere with developing a mutual understanding of one another. This might be the answer to world peace!
B: I'm not so sure about that. Good luck getting this thing to turn what Donald Trump has to say into something peaceful.
And now, once translated and re-translated, we get...
Person A: Check out this amazing gadget! It allows me to listen to what you say in German in English there! Here is a replacement. Put it in your ear, and you can listen to my English and German dictionary!
Person B: Big! Now our different languages will not deter us to understand each other!
A: Imagine, with this we can break language barriers that interfere with the development of a mutual understanding of each other. This could be the answer to world peace!
B: I'm not so sure. Good luck always to turn this thing what Donald Trump has to say in a little quieter.
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Somehow, me thinks we still have a long ways to go. Though, I can say that this is a whole lot better than what Google was producing 15 years ago.
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Well, that's quite a surprising outcome for your experiment. The general meaning of the conversation didn't get lost in translation, and while there was a little weirdness, a sane human being is perfectly capable of understanding that.
Did you try other languages - more exotic ones, such as Mandarin or Vietnamese?
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Result from English - Chinese (traditional) - English (the original text is yours):
Person A: Look at this amazing gadget! It let me hear what you're saying German English! There is a spare. Put it in your ear, you can hear me translate it into English and German!
Person B: Great! Now, our different languages will not stop us from understanding each other!
A: Imagine, with this, we can break with the development of mutual understanding and mutual interference language barriers. This may be the answer to world
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The problem with google is: they made the grave mistake to use english as intermediate language.
Everything coming from English or going to english translates ok.
But German - French, or as in your example German - Thai, gives mostly bollocks.
If I have to translate any text using translate.google.com I use english as the target language, choosing any other is so bad it is not even funny.
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Is this a valid experiment?
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I'm sure plenty of /. folks are fluent in Klingon and Tel'Quessir (elven).
I suspect we may also find a fairly substantial number of speakers of Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, and Lojban.
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Text within an iteration translation party interested in English to reach the English re-translation Japan translation equilibrium does not change.
Do they have to talk into your ear (Score:2)
Awesome (Score:2)
Hot French Girl (Score:1)
Why? (Score:2)
Why are we still speaking 100's of different languages in the world? Seems a device like this side steps a fundamental advancement that human culture has yet to obtain.
Optimistically... (Score:1)
Positive thoughts, critic and cynic acknowledged upfront. The cynic and critic will say you can see how bad Google translate is by translating and reverse translating.
So let's put voice recognition capability aside and ask what if this new gadget is exactly as good/bad as Google translate?
it will still save you your free hands and a lot of time from looking things up in a phrase book or one word at a t
Re: Optimistically... (Score:1)
Apologies for other typos or formatting errors made in haste.
Re: universal translator (Score:1)
Re: universal translator (Score:1)
Wow. OK, I'll feed the troll.
Firstly this person is probably your customer, or your customer's customer. So they pay your salary.
Next, are you sure they live in your country? On holiday? Visiting?
Next, do they speak only in their foreign language all day, every day? Are you sure? Do you suggest everyone becomes fluent in a language before they visit the country?
For some languages,with dedicated effort, even getting close to high-school level language will take several years on
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one thing i have run into is folks that not only REFUSE to speak English but get offended when you can't speak %other language%. (they are also proud of their ignorance)
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I would hazard a guess that you've never learned another language. It's not easy, at least not as an adult. Much harder than learning algebra, for instance.
As for babbling in foreign language, I suppose it's equally possible that the Mohawks, Cherokees, Navajos, Ojibways, Aleuts, Sioux, Salishen, Lushootseeds and others get annoyed hearing you babble in English.