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Gadget Claims To Fit In Your Ear and Translate Foreign Languages In Real-Time (telegraph.co.uk) 103

Posted by msmash from the just-like-the-movies dept.
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.
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Gadget Claims To Fit In Your Ear and Translate Foreign Languages In Real-Time More

Gadget Claims To Fit In Your Ear and Translate Foreign Languages In Real-Time

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  • HHGG (Score:5, Funny)

    by fuzznutz ( 789413 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @01:47PM (#52129243)
    Is it a babelfish?
    • DON'T PANIC! I'm sure it's not a fish.
    • Dammit. Beaten to the draw by TFA.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by EnOne ( 786812 )
      Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the NON-existence of God. The argument goes like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.' `But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arg

    • Is it a babelfish?

      No other name would fit better, regardless if only 10% of the population "gets it"...

    • no it's a pilot fish. It translates and clears the waxy build-up out of your ears

    • Sounds more like a Pilot Fish [wikipedia.org].

  • Uh, sure (Score:5, Funny)

    by wcrowe ( 94389 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @01:52PM (#52129285)

    "My hovercraft is full of eels..."

  • Age Old Meme (Score:5, Insightful)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @01:52PM (#52129289) Homepage

    1) Google Translate
    2) Bluetooth Headset
    3) PROFIT!

  • An app? (Score:3)

    by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @01:59PM (#52129347)

    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?

    • Re: An app? (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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)

    by laurencetux ( 841046 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @01:59PM (#52129349)

    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?

    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        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

    • Cor blimey guv, that'd be a rum do and no mistake me old china.

      That's how rednecks talk, isn't it?

  • Just a wild guess.

  • Universal Translator v 1.0

  • Am I missing something? Google translate can already be set for automatic translation and will listen to anyone who speaks. It's far from perfect, but it does work. Perhaps the benefit here is that the translation is much better? Cheers, Bruce.

  • My bullshit detector is going off (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweilo8888 ( 921799 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @02:18PM (#52129503)
    This one ticks all the boxes:

    * 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)

      by Verdatum ( 1257828 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @02:54PM (#52129781)
      I would love it if Slashdot had a rule to not bother with articles about companies who are still in the funding phase of their crowdfunding campaign unless the project provides detailed implementation specifics. Granted, /. isn't nearly as bad about this as many other tech reporting sites. But it's still a waste of everyone's time when it happens. And possibly worse, it grows that stupid-ass "AS FEATURED ON" list of logos that these sort of projects looove to use as false-credibility. They might as well call that section "The following websites have recently had slow-news-days and/or employ editors who don't bother to verify the validity of scientific or technical claims"

    • Re:My bullshit detector is going off (Score:4, Insightful)

      by BasilBrush ( 643681 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @03:06PM (#52129873)

      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.

    • Translating audio in real time is a fool's errand.
      Erm ... you are 20 years behind ...

      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

      • 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

        • 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

  • 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)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @02:32PM (#52129619)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • It *claims*? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "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.)

  • 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)

    by Pollux ( 102520 ) <speter@[ ]ata.net.eg ['ted' in gap]> on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @02:55PM (#52129785) Journal

    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.

    -----

    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.

    • 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?

      • 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

        • 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.

    • Is this a valid experiment?

    • You may be interested in Translation Party [translationparty.com], which iteratively does English to Japanese to English translation (via Bing translate APIs) until an equilibrium is reached - i.e. the retranslated text no longer changes.

      Text within an iteration translation party interested in English to reach the English re-translation Japan translation equilibrium does not change.

  • and pause slightly between each word? NECESITO UN pastilla de menta. USTED sabe donde puedo encontrar alguna?
  • Now my life can be just like dubbed Godzilla movies!
  • If I was 25 years younger, I would want to communicate with that French girl, too - although I speak French. Damn - youth is wasted on the young.

  • 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.

  • I don't know anything about this particular project, and yes I'd guess it's plausibly snakeoil. But...

    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

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