New York start-up Waverly Labs has released “the world’s first language-translating earpiece”. It works in pairs; you wear one earpiece and your foreign friend wears the other. The earpieces pick up your voices, send it to a paired smartphone app via Bluetooth, and then come out as translated speech in the other person’s ear. It does not require an internet connection. If you’ve only got one earbud, the other person can speak into the Pilot app on their smartphone, and the translation feature gets going. The system comes with English, Spanish, French and Italian languages. Hindi, Arabic, East Asian and Slavic languages will be available soon.
While the concept of a universal translator sounds pretty cool, it isn’t exactly new technology. Microsoft has its Skype Translator, which takes speech, translates it to text, and then audibly speaks it back to the other person. This isn’t entirely useful if you’re out having a conversation in person with someone, but the speech translation engine exists.
There is also Google Translate’s conversation mode, which automatically detects which language is being spoken and translates it out loud. It requires a phone to be positioned between the two speakers and could pick up a lot of unwanted noise, though.
However, because the Pilot requires two earpieces, it will likely only capture the voice of the person wearing it, which already makes it better than Google Translate for regular use in the real world — that is, as long as the translation engine is as good as Google’s or better.
Picture Credit : Google
