
Google Pixel Buds are wireless earbuds that translate conversations in real-time - Sujan
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/10/google-pixel-buds-are-wireless-earbuds-that-translate-conversations-in-real-time/
======
kibwen
If you're a technologist looking for ways to save the world, enabling
communication between people of different countries is about as important a
task as you can find. The web was a good first step, but language is still a
barrier. Being unable to communicate with someone dehumanizes them. Automatic
translation isn't going to automatically bring about world peace (and it isn't
going to automatically enable us to transcend cultural barriers), but it's an
enormously important next step.

I criticize Google and Microsoft a lot, and I will continue to do so when
necessary, but I applaud their efforts toward this goal, especially since
there's so little financial incentive to do so. Even if this product is as
limited in practice as I suspect, it's heartening to see such crucial
technology mature.

~~~
dogma1138
People are quite able to communicate, willing is another issue.

Name one current conflict in which language and the inability to communicate
is a barrier.

While the sentiment is nice and fluffy it’s also without any substance.

This is a toy for tourists and expats not a tool for world peace.

~~~
panzagl
If Joe Sixpack and Mohammed can communicate with each other they won't sit
idly by while the fear-mongers use the other to justify terrorism/enforced
liberty importation. At least in theory.

~~~
brown9-2
This would seem easily disproven by any country that has sectarian conflicts
where both sides speak the same language. Or for instance, racial division in
America.

~~~
kibwen
I'm not sure what the argument here is. That the US would be better off if
Republicans and Democrats spoke mutually unintelligible languages? By what
logic does it make sense to say "group A and group B are at odds; group A and
group B speak the same language; therefore we disprove that speaking the same
language will ever resolve anything"?

~~~
freehunter
The argument is that

> _If Joe Sixpack and Mohammed can communicate with each other they won 't sit
> idly by while the fear-mongers use the other to justify terrorism/enforced
> liberty importation_

is easily disproven by the fact that this still happens all the time among
people who speak the same language. Speaking a different language doesn't help
communication obviously, but speaking the same language doesn't magically
remove prejudice and hatred.

~~~
ethbro
Saying that example disproves the grandparent is being pedantic.

What they were saying was that "if Joe Sixpack and Mohammed can communicate
with each other, _[more often]_ they won't sit idly by while the fear-mongers
[...]"

The counter-example of single-language conflict ignores the larger forest of
language being a key leveller of cultural differences (i.e. necessary but not
sufficient), as well as gp's obviously statistical rather than absolute
example.

It's pretty clear he or she wasn't saying that 'as long as two people speak
the same language, there will _never_ be conflict between them.'

------
hackerews
The "translate conversations in real-time" part seems to have nothing to do
with the Google Pixel Buds - it's already live in the Google Translate app.

In fact, you can try it right now. Open the Google Translate app on android,
put on a pair of headphones with a mic, and tap the audio translation. As you
hear spoken word in another language, it'll translate in realtime back to your
non-google headphones.

*note - The trick is you need to press the button so it enables translation across both languages, as that seems to be the only way to keep translation on even after the first phrase.

------
djrogers
The translation stuff seems to all be handled by your phone, so what is it
about these specifically that makes them required for this type of
functionality? I'm having trouble seeing why this shouldn't work with any set
of earbuds...

~~~
syphilis2
I think what completes the puzzle is that the Pixel 2 phone omits a headphone
jack. Without a headphone jack wireless earbuds are required. Normally
wireless earbuds would be superfluous, so they're introduced with a use case
that highlights their advantages.

That's to say, I don't believe the Pixel Buds are necessary at all for real
time translation. But I think they're presented with the real time translation
to give people some positive and cool imagery to associate with the earbuds.
It's advertising as far as I can tell.

~~~
djrogers
So any old bluetooth headset will work, or have they artificially limited it
to pixel buds?

~~~
CamelCaseName
Only Pixel Buds will work. You can read this comment chain by someone who
worked on the project to learn more about why they made that decision:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15404395](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15404395)

------
bognition
Does anyone else not see the irony in the pixel name. Google became big by
tracking people online using tracking pixels, now their tracking people in the
real world using physical pixels

~~~
megy
When I think pixel, I don't think tracking pixel. So no.

------
Zaheer
I use Bose Soundsport Wireless headphones currently and the mic is terrible at
filtering background noise. Given this is about the same price range it seems
like a worthy competitor even as an iOS user.

------
patrickxb
Is this a Babel fish?

~~~
hprotagonist
in my experiences as a user of and developer for speech recognition systems, I
have concluded that the best any machine translation system is going to be
able to do is translate really basic, imperative communications.

e.g, "Don't eat that!" "We are friendly, don't shoot" "There is food in the
kitchen" "Where is the nearest bathroom?"...That will all work relatively
well.

Punishing others with Vogon poetry in their own native tongue... never gonna
happen.

~~~
xapata
Google's remarkably good at translating anything that reads like news. Because
there are so many news articles written about the same topic in different
languages, that data is great. Google is not so good at translating things
like love letters, because it's hard to get someone to write one in two
languages and publish both.

~~~
hprotagonist
certainly the relative paucity of some subject matter to train on is a factor.

The other factor is that complex use of natural languages depend on and
require ambiguity and layered meaning and hosts of other factors that are
really hard to handle.

~~~
xapata
I'm not sure love letters are more complex than the news. It often turns out
we're not as complex as we think. Or that doing simple calculations on very
large amounts of data captures all those nuances. That was the result
described in "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data".

~~~
hprotagonist
there's (far) more information in-band in a snippet of language than there is
in the "plain" "meaning" of that snippet. All of it's relevant for
translation, and none of that is easily tractable.

A fairly trivial example is a pun. Translating highly idiomatic things of this
nature turns out to be extraordinarily hard, and just throwing more data at a
DNN is not going to get you too far down that road.

~~~
xapata
That depends on how often that pun appears in the corpus. If you observe the
translation enough times, it'll be easy for the computer.

~~~
hprotagonist
this misses the point. There do exist untranslatable idioms, and puns are an
easy example. They rely on language-specific features like rhymes (or sight-
rhyme) or homophones that are not preserved across corpora.

You can absolutely make a "direct" word-for-word translation of a pun in
english to, say, russian. It's just not a pun any more when you're done. Often
there are no "pun equivalents" with totally different words, because usually
they hinge on culturally specific references that also don't translate well.

Basically none of this matters when what you're interested in is subway
directions or ordering food or whatever, but it becomes intractable really
fast whenever you're interested in talking about something more meaningful.

~~~
xapata
Au contraire, it doesn't matter if the pun is translated directly. Heck,
Google might be doing whole paragraph translation for all we know. It's
certainly not at the level of individual words.

Translate words and it's gibberish. Pairs of words and you start to get slang.
Triples and you can distinguish word that are different parts of speech in
different contexts. Quads and grammar is mostly in the bag. 5-grams and most
puns are handled. 6-grams and you've taken care of all simple sentences. Etc.

No need for semantics when n-gram counts does just as well.

With enough people talking, we'll eventually have taught Google all the
translations for all possible sentences. (joking, but only halfway)

~~~
hprotagonist
>it doesn't matter if the pun is translated directly.

you can't do this anyway.

>No need for semantics when n-gram counts does just as well.

They don't. neither do bag of words, word2vec, or whatever.

Simple imperative language? Absolutely, this all works pretty well. Anything
else? Ha.

------
carbocation
This would be invaluable for patient encounters. If anyone at Google is
reading this -- is there any plan to make a set like this available with a BAA
/ HIPAA compliance?

------
bduerst
My in-laws don't speak English. I have to try this with them around the
holidays.

~~~
jdavis703
I can understand using these for situations where you're only going to be
around a language for a limited amount of time (business trip, vacation, etc).
But presumably your in-laws are going to be around for a while, so what's the
rationale for not learning to speak their language?

~~~
chipperyman573
Not the OP but trying to learn another language so that you can speak it with
people you see maybe twice a year seems a little silly. I would agree with you
if OP lived with their inlaws or something, though.

~~~
baby
I see my inlaws twice a year or less, still learning the language (or at least
trying).

------
pdog
Pixel Buds? What does a _pixel_ have to do with an audio device?

Google's branding department, as usual, leaves much to be desired.

~~~
sogen
Alphabet's Google Chrome Pixel Buds

~~~
CoolGuySteve
Sounds like that old Microsoft iPod parody, the Microsoft iPod Pro 2005 XP
Human Ear Professional Edition.

~~~
sogen
Ahh Classic, thanks for that, made me choke on my snack :)

------
Rebelgecko
Its cool that you can use the earbud case to recharge your phone (or vice
versa). However, as a lefty I think it'd be annoying to be forced to use my
right hand whenever I want to control my headphones.

------
jagermo
* if you have a smartphone connected and a decent connection to the internet to use google translate.

~~~
soared
Did you expect the earbuds to have a wireless connection and processor inside
of them? (and if so, wouldn't you have complained about privacy issues
anyways?)

~~~
maxerickson
It seems we need better words. They do have a wireless connection and
processor inside of them.

The problem is that the processor probably isn't powerful enough and the
wireless won't connect to the internet.

------
Macsenour
Pardon if this was asked but it's not clear to me, since they are Bluetooth,
wouldn't they work with any device that also runs Google Translate?

~~~
Macsenour
I have an answer... of course they're work but the language detection isn't
automatic. You have to run the app first but if you have a Pixel 2 phone, it
will run the app for you when it detects a different language. Or so the ad
reads...

------
bhouston
I have Google Assistant on my OnePlus 3. Would these work with it the same as
with the Pixel 2? Would these work with a Pixel 1 the same way?

~~~
DerfNet
It _seems_ these only work in this fashion with Pixel devices.

I understand they're trying to create an air of exclusivity but it really just
comes off kind of greedy and dickish when in reality, _any_ earbuds with a
microphone should be capable of doing the same thing through Google Translate.

~~~
r00fus
As a big Apple fan, I have no idea why Google should take flack for making
this an exclusive (other than their previous "we're more open and open==good"
hypocrisy).

Exclusivity means they have a limited hardware profile and control the quality
out of the gate. Rolling it for use on all e.g. Android6 devices is sure to be
a support nightmare.

It also may expand to other (Android|iOS) devices in future.

------
runamok
I may have poor reading comprehension but per
[https://support.google.com/googlepixelbuds/answer/7544332?hl...](https://support.google.com/googlepixelbuds/answer/7544332?hl=en&ref_topic=7544331)

The "killer feature" of realtime-ish translation only works with the Pixel
phones.

 _To use as a headset, you need a Bluetooth® enabled companion device
running:_

Android 5.0 or higher iOS 10.0 or higher

 _To use with Google Assistant you need:_

An Assistant enabled Android device Android 6.0 or higher A Google Account A
data connection

 _To use with Google Translate you need:_

Pixel or Pixel 2 The Google Translate app (A list of supported languages can
be found here.)

------
dlevine
It seems like we're getting to the level that people talked about in Science
Fiction not that long ago. Even when Google was started in 1998, I'm not sure
that people would believe you if you said that in 20 years Google would be
putting out a product that automatically translates spoken conversations in
realtime.

Sure the technology isn't perfect, but it actually works surprisingly well (at
least the translation part). I have been learning Mandarin Chinese recently,
and the translations provided by Google Translate are pretty darn good (if not
exact, they are close enough to understand).

~~~
megy
You mean the level where we can contact almost anyone in the world at anytime?
We have full access to the worlds knowledge at anytime? On a device that fits
into your pocket?

We have been hitting sci-fi goals for a while now, and it is awesome!

------
plandis
Performing translation on the fly with technology is a HUGE win for humanity.
I'm glad to see others besides Hear One taking this seriously for your average
consumer.

It's unclear to me though; will these work with any phone?

------
alexanderstears
Very neat, but I wish it came in an over-the-ear version. I'd like to travel
to Japan some day soon, I'd like to buy some rare vintage stuff, and I can't
imagine handing an ear wax encrusted earbud to some elderly farmer.

As wireless ear buds these are somewhat interesting, as a translation device
these are fascinating, why can't google sell more translation stuff?

~~~
scardine
As pointed by ss17n:

> The two way functionality works with only one pair of buds - the other user
> holds the phone

So just keep the ear wax encrusted earbud for yourself. :-)

------
theDoug
It took me a long time to find, but here are the 40 languages supported:
[https://support.google.com/googlepixelbuds/answer/7547959?hl...](https://support.google.com/googlepixelbuds/answer/7547959?hl=en&ref_topic=7544331)

------
gigatexal
Really cool feature, curious how it works in practice. This kind of thing
could sway me from iOS.

~~~
ams6110
It's really not that remarkable, given what parts already exist. In pseudo
command line:

    
    
       speech_to_text --language=english | google_translate --from=english --to=swedish | text_to_speech --language=swedish
    

All this product does is hook up a few pieces that Google had already
developed.

~~~
dingdongding
It is remarkable because it happens in realtime.

~~~
ams6110
Spoken language is actually very slow compared to what computers can handle.
Google Translate would have no trouble keeping up.

------
pgeorgep
You may be able to hear, but how does it help you speak back to them in a
different language?

~~~
dragonwriter
It's, IME, _very_ common for immigrants (especially those that immigrated in
middle age) to be intelligible to native speakers when speaking the local
language, but have more trouble understanding native speakers. So one-way
translation may be useful.

(OTOH, it may also mess with code-switching.)

~~~
goialoq
That's the reverse of the common case -- it's much easier to learn receptive
language than expressive language.

------
rahulchowdhury
I remember a Kickstarter project which demoed a small device that you can keep
in front of you and it will act as your very own real-time translator.

But this is super dope. Great job by the team at Google.

------
foobaw
This is just an early iteration for the future. Imagine the possibilities
while travelling, attending conferences, eating at foreign restaurants.

Can't wait until this becomes commonplace.

~~~
DerfNet
I feel like this already should be commonplace. I used Google Translate back
in 2014 on a trip to Japan. Really came in useful when a hotel didn't have my
reservation. Since then they've added the conversational mode that effectively
makes Translate work identically to what was demonstrated with these earbuds.

~~~
FroshKiller
That's my beef with the feature. Since the earbuds already require a phone
with Assistant, why wouldn't I use the conversation mode in the Translate app
instead, which is superior in every way?

------
belorn
Linux tech tip had a review of such device that they found on kickstarter a
month ago. Is google adding something to the concept?

~~~
teddyh
Link here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TayZG3aFubs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TayZG3aFubs)

------
rorosaurus
Does anyone have a link to the demo video?

~~~
electriclove
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWb1ysqtc4o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWb1ysqtc4o)

------
doubleorseven
Sorry for the short comment but won't this be the next "Google glasses"?

------
mtgx
Are those conversations also stored on Google's servers? I know I _shouldn 't_
even have to ask this question, but who knows these days with Google.

~~~
firethief
Does it matter? They pass through Google's servers; results of analyzing them
are stored on Google's servers; the full audio is probably stored on the NSA's
servers; if Google says they don't store the full text, does that meaningfully
alter the level of privacy you can expect?

~~~
alasdair_
>Does it matter?

In states that require two-party consent in their wiretapping statutes, it
probably does.

------
drewrv
Translating conversations in real time is cool, but I need that feature how
often? I switch my earbuds between my phone and laptop multiple times a day
and it's a pain for every pair of bluetooth earbuds ever.

At least Apple tried to solve the problem. Google appears to be acting like
Samsung here, adding gimmicks while releasing a lesser product.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
I think this is more a problem of you not being the target audience.

I'd use it lots... and lots. I'm an immigrant, and though I do alright with
the local language (Norwegian, and I'm a native English speaker),
conversations are sometimes difficult. Neil Gaiman in Norwegian is a difficult
read for me, but I*m past kids books. Some folks would talk to me more, since
lots of people understand some english but aren't so comfortable speaking it.
Google translate isn't perfect, but it continues to get better.

I can see retail employees having access to a pair at work. Restaurants.
Travel. And so on.

~~~
drewrv
I understand the appeal. I've lived places where I can't even order off a
menu. My in-laws don't speak any English. If/when this works flawlessly it has
the potential to change the world. It just amazes me that there's a company
that can ship star trek level tech yet nobody can make wireless earbuds easy
to use!

