
In-Ear Device That Translates Foreign Languages in Real Time - maxoliver
http://www.boredpanda.com/real-time-translator-ear-waverly-labs/
======
Kurtz79
Sorry to sound so negative, but it seems something halfway between an April
Fool and some Kickstarter "scam" (possibly in good conscience, but still).

Both voice recognition and translation are HARD problems, for which even
companies with tons of resources and talent like Apple and Google were able to
provide only sketchy and partial solutions.

No to mention issues like battery life, connectivity (hard to believe this
device would be able to work without a permanent connection to cloud servers
doing the heavy lifting, like Siri does) etc...

The FAQ is simply "too good to be true".

[http://www.waverlylabs.com/2016/05/faqs-about-early-bird-
and...](http://www.waverlylabs.com/2016/05/faqs-about-early-bird-and-launch-
date/)

~~~
russelluresti
I'm also skeptical. This is a problem where it's fairly easy to get 80% there
but nearly impossible to get 100% there. Most speech recognition apps have
trouble with thick accents. From there, imagine stumbling speech or people who
change their thoughts in the middle of a sentence. Then there's the lag
between input and output - you often can't translate a phrase or sentence
until you know the whole thing and then you're adding computer computation
time onto it.

I think this type of technology is inevitable, but I think we're still 50
years away from it being ubiquitous.

~~~
Swizec
Nevermind thick accents. What about languages that have tens, even hundreds,
of dialects?

Slovenian, for instance, has only 2,000,000 speakers. Yet there are 56
officially classified dialects. [1] They all vary in important ways, sometimes
to the point that a speaker from one dialect has trouble understanding a
speaker from another.

French is another language with hundreds of dialects. [2] My girlfriend is
French, but when she goes to the Caribbean, she has trouble following
conversation because their French is so much different than hers.

English makes for a wonderful example too. Not only does it have hundreds of
dialects, there are at least 4 different Englishes. UK, US, Aussie, African-
American Vernacular. They're starting to show signs of splitting into separate
languages. They already have differences in vocabulary and grammar.

Then you can add slang on top of all this.

Oh and to add to all this confusion: In most European countries people learn
the standardized form of their native language almost as if it was a foreign
language.

I don't think we'll ever get to 100% accuracy with a tool like this. Even
humans themselves can't do 100%.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_dialects#List_of_diale...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_dialects#List_of_dialects)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_French](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_French)

~~~
Kalium
In South Texas, I once encountered a man speaking English with a very strong
Acadian accent. I had to listen to him speak for several minutes before I even
realized that what he was speaking was in fact English. Accents and dialects
are incredibly complex.

------
rcarmo
It's not wet and squirmy like a babel fish, but I fear the consequences of it
being able to fully translate product/sales-speak into engineer-speak and
vice-versa.

Like Douglas Adams wrote:

"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to
communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and
bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

~~~
hyperpallium
an ambivalent perspective from Vernor Vinge, aFUtD

"Ravna had a theory (not that widely accepted, actually) that where beings
have a common fluency, little else matters."

------
impy
I'm skeptical we'll be seeing this device. I guess it'll mainly depend if
they'd get funded and even then I only see this as a short lived gimmick. The
machine translation software just isn't good enough. It's unmissable to me,
but for real time translation, it's simply not there yet. Since they have to
license the speech recognition and machine translation technologies, in the
end they'll just be competing with bluetooth headsets that are suited for
picking up voices in conversations and they'll simple draw the shortest straw.

~~~
visarga
Agree. What does the earplug device offer that regular bluetooth headsets
don't. The actual translation is happening in the phone or cloud anyway.

~~~
impy
Well, the regular bluetooth headsets wont do the job just yet, you want the
microphone to be directional forward facing to keep it simple, preferably
adaptable but that's more complex. The regular bluetooth headsets are aimed at
picking up your own voice. So you'd want something more hearing aid like.

------
corin_
It's hard to imagine that it will work smoothly enough to be useful, at least
right away, and more of an interesting gimmicky gadget. I'm looking forward to
trying it regardless, assuming they succeed in releasing it (due September).

edit: Slightly misleading on their website. Says "Signup on the waitlist and
be entered to win a FREE pair!" When you sign-up it then says they are giving
away one per month and you can get one entry into the prize draw by doing
certain things such as tweeting about them or liking them on FB, but that I
have 0 entries for signing up to the waitlist. Meh, I would have signed up for
updates anyway, and don't particularly care about a contest I'd likely not
win, it's just the principle of misleading wording.

~~~
sleepychu
+1 the kind of company I just don't want to deal with.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Reminds me of x.ai. You sign up, they put you on a huge "waitlist" that moves
slowly, and periodically remind you that you can jump big chunks of that list
by spamming people about the product on social media.

Asking people to whore themselves on social media is becoming a new startup
marketing strategy. I hate stuff like this.

~~~
CPLX
> Asking people to whore themselves on social media is becoming a new startup
> marketing strategy.

New?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Among _popular_ startups? The waiting list approach? New, at least for me.

------
dcw303
I have a bad enough time getting Siri to understand my Aussie accent. Throw in
something as inaccurate as Google Translate and you'll have... A pile of
garbage really.

I desperately need something to translate Japanese into my ear, and I'm
probably just good enough to relay my point back without the other party
needing an eng->jp version, so I would be a prime customer for this gadget.
But the technological accuracy is just not yet there in either speech
recognition or translation.

~~~
GordonS
I'm from Scotland, and on the rare occassions time I need to phone a US voice
activated phone line (e.g. Expedia.com's), I have to put on a ridiculous
American accent for the system to understand me.

This is a _hard_ problem.

~~~
coldtea
Obligatory link:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8)

------
piyush_soni
I think making the device is the easy part, the hard part is doing the
translation right in most of the cases, which both Google and Bing have been
unable to do so far. 'Google Translate' app already has a communication mode
where two people with different languages can talk, but if it worked good
there was nothing preventing them to make such an earpiece.

~~~
hyperpallium
They are something like 95% right, 1 wrong in 20[ _], which is pretty often.
But in a face to face conversation, with so much non-verbal communication
going on, it may be more than enough. Very different from cold, isolated
translation or online.

It's certainly far ahead of having no language, or trying to look up a phrase
book.

BTW It's like "word lens" for audio
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Lens](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Lens)
Google bought and made it free. I've tried it, and it works, it's very cool.
But I don't know if it's actually that useful, or even gets used much, in the
field.

[_] EDIT sorry, those figures were just for speech recognition!

~~~
piyush_soni
> _They are something like 95% right, 1 wrong in 20_

Which set of languages is this stat about? For example, trying English with
Hindi (they don't support it right now), though Google Translate is
impressive, there are still a lot of mistakes (much more than 1 in 20). For
English to Spanish, I assume the error rate would be lesser in comparison.

~~~
samastur
It isn't that better. Admittedly I am only learning Spanish, but I get odd or
incorrect translations far more often than 1 in 20 and because I am a
beginner, I don't throw really difficult cases at it.

This is also text only use so ignoring things like accents (was that a p, v or
b?) which can make the whole thing even more difficult.

For other languages, like my native Slovenian, it is even more ridiculous.

------
scotty79
I'd like to see more audio augmented reality systems. Translation, taking baby
cry down a notch, amplifying speech directed at you, autofiguring out best
moment to tell you things you might need to know.

~~~
phireal
> taking baby cry down a notch

This could end badly. I think the whole purpose of babies crying is to ensure
you do something about it.

Not that there's always a solution, but I'd rather be awoken by a loud,
irritating cry frequently than not hear them when they might need me.

~~~
scotty79
With baby everyting can go badly. I wasn't thinking about shutting out baby
cry to get some sleep (sleeping with headphones?) but rather making it little
less intrusive when it screems in your face and you are sufficiently aware
that it does already. Also I was thinking about capping the volume of baby cry
to some level (80dB?) not reducing it propotionately.

Besides, I'm not sure how the number of babies harmed because of not crying
loud enough compares to the number of babies that were hurt because they cried
too loud.

Loudness of baby cries is probably delicately finetuned for other times when
incentive to feed you baby had to overcome the desire to feed youself bit
more.

I think modern humans have enough other incentives to keep their babies alive
and healthy.

Disclaimer: I have no children. I am not significantly bothered by other
people babies crying.

~~~
crpatino
> I wasn't thinking about shutting out baby cry to get some sleep (sleeping
> with headphones?)

This is not the intended use, but people will figure out on their own and do
it anyways...

Then, one day, a baby will die horribly or something, a solicitor will contact
the parents... and profit!!! (or in your case, bankrupcy)

~~~
scotty79
If you wanted to shut out your baby crying while you sleep you wouldn't use
rigid earphones with partial baby cry noise cancellation. You's just buy
flexible comfy earplugs for few cents and you can do it today.

You are right that lawyers scare the crap out of innovators though.

------
kriro
How good are cell phone microphones? Could I hack up a similar device with my
regular headset plugged into my phone and the phone picking up the speech and
translating it and reading it back to me (Google Translate)? So basically
phone/app doing all the work and using whatever headphone is available. I
suppose the hard parts are identifying what originates from a person and the
actual speech to text and back?

So far it seems like it could be build from existing blocks. Doesn't have to
be great and can gradually improve...a worthy hack around project imo

I haven't checked in on CMU's Sphinx in a while but that was a speech-speech
system I looked at for a bit. What are the state of the art building blocks
for such a project? Would I want speech-text-speech (I assume this is easier?)
or directly speech-speech?

Edit: This list seems useful:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_speech_recognition_sof...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_speech_recognition_software#Open_source_acoustic_models_and_speech_corpus)

~~~
r-w
Doesn't seem far from what Google Translate already does; it's just a matter
of automatically dictating the translation.

------
planetjones
I just don't see this working very well. The current language translation
tools just are not good enough to support a proper conversation. Translating
languages via technology is a hard problem and it's far from solved. Coupled
with this fundamental problem is identifying speech accurately; something Siri
fails to do regularly with my voice. If this thing gets built I am guessing it
will be a novelty product.

------
netsharc
"Do you want... do you want to come back to my place, bouncy-bouncy?"

~~~
Piskvorrr
My hovercraft is full of eels.

------
nikkwong
Just the fact that they are listing their product on Indiegogo instead of
Kickstarter signals to me that they _probably_ got shut when trying to publish
their project on Kickstarter—who is trying hard to distance theirselves from
these moonshot projects that are likely to disappoint consumers. If you don't
have a really serious working prototype now, Kickstarter is super-duper
hesitant to let you on their platform.

------
madaxe_again
Now, if there were a product that would have appropriately been called
babelfish, this would have been it.

But no, "pilot". I guess yahoo copyrighted babelfish?

~~~
corin_
Could they trademark (it wouldn't be copyright) a term that they themselves
copied from a work of fiction they don't own the copyright to, given that the
context (i.e. what it does) isn't different to that in the work of fiction?

~~~
madaxe_again
Yes - and yes, trademark, not copyright, pre-coffee conflation. Consider the
Nexus line of phones, lifted directly from PKD's _Do Androids Dream_.
Copyright is about area of applicability - I bet babelfish is trademarked for
"translation services and products".

~~~
kuschku
This is like as if I’d trademark "Quidditch" for a sports league where a sport
is played with brooms, flying around, etc.

That shouldn’t be possible, and hopefully any court would laugh at whoever
claims to have a trademark on Babelfish.

~~~
madaxe_again
Oddly, while I can find three trademarks, Yahoo isn't one of the holders.

[https://trademarks.justia.com/785/15/babelfish-78515910.html](https://trademarks.justia.com/785/15/babelfish-78515910.html)

[https://trademarks.justia.com/772/49/babelfish-77249656.html](https://trademarks.justia.com/772/49/babelfish-77249656.html)

[https://trademarks.justia.com/851/07/babel-
fish-85107190.htm...](https://trademarks.justia.com/851/07/babel-
fish-85107190.html)

------
lordxenu
This seems like a scam, or at best a marketing lie. Voice recognition is still
an experimental field that's very difficult to get right. Even today's
professional voice recognition software requires some voice training. There's
no way this thing can accurately pick up speech in a random environment.

And given that most voice recognition software require some decent hardware
(think your phone or your pc). I doubt it's gonna fit into that tiny earpiece
with today's hardware specs.

------
Grue3
This isn't necessarily possible for any two random languages. Not every
language has a SubjectVerbObject order like English, and even if it does, each
language has its own quirks with how the words are ordered. For example in
spanish "un pez grande" = "a big fish", but if you translate in real time it
comes out as "a fish big". Of course, an interpreter can reword it as "a fish,
which is big, ..." but this is not always possible.

------
dboreham
What is wrong with you people? 7 hours old and only TWO mentions of Douglas
Adams??

------
CodeSheikh
Too good to be true. Seems like they are just trying to get some media
traction to convince some VC for some funding or creating a footprint for
themselves in the tech fraternity.

Yes I will be a cynical hypocrite when it hits the market with seamless
performance and after I will purchase it.

Real life scenario:

French chick: Bonjour. es tu perdu?

Scrawny-geek: (All blushing and shit...Is she interested in me? put on
"groundbreaking" Pilot earbuds)

FC: excusez moi mister!!

SG: _gives hand gesture to wait_

10 seconds time lapse

analog audio signals are converted to digital and then data buffer is sent to
the smartphone via BT. Phone pre-process the raw data and sends it to Watson-
Siri-Echo-Now-esque ultra system composed of signal processor then NLP then
translator and it sends it back to the phone and phone does some more voodoo
on it and sends it back to the Pilot via BT and plays it to its user.

SG: Oh. I am sorry mademoiselle. I am just trying to find direction to the
bathroom.

FC: _lost and confused expressions appear as if she did not understand one
word of English_

SG: _punching the air in frustration..wish this device could play the
translation back to me in French_

------
alphydan
I can't wait for the mis-translation anecdotes to start pouring in ... maybe I
should make a site to collect them :)

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/03/google-
translat...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/03/google-translate-
error-as-pontes-spain-clitoris-food-festival-grelo-galicia)

------
6stringmerc
Considering the variety of French accents - Paris, regional France, Africa,
Caribbean, Canadian, South East Asian, and guys like me in Texas and more -
I'm rather skeptical this unit will work as seamlessly as the marketing video
advertises. Just a thought. C'est mignonne, vraiment.

------
pka
I remember reading an "interactive" book as a kid (a book with numbered short
episodes, and at the end of each one you are presented with a couple of
choices how the story would continue, it was awesome) where the good guy was
sent back in time by the bad guy to the wild west where he had to convince the
indians to trust him and fight with him against the same bad guy, who liked to
slaughter them for fun, or die with them. In order to understand the natives,
he had some gadget implanted in his brain that translated their language
directly into his own. I remember thinking "yeah right, never gonna happen."
:)

This is probably far away from being able to translate languages perfectly,
but still. The future came pretty fast.

------
Qworg
This is just Skype Translator coupled with an earpiece... :)

[https://www.skype.com/en/features/skype-
translator/](https://www.skype.com/en/features/skype-translator/)

------
curiousigor
Just wondering if this is anything more than a in-ear bluetooth headset
connected to an app that uses google translate as its backend? Because if yes,
they would maybe have more success selling the app that you can use with the
headphones you already own already and so making the user acquisition a bit
smoother than buying a bluetooth headset...I guess more people would give less
money for an app that gets updated than an headset that could potentially
break... Unless there is some technology in the headset itself so it can work
on its own without the app connected to it. Didn't see anything like that
mentioned here though.

~~~
LoSboccacc
hope not the requirement for being online all the time is quite taxing
especially if you use this abroad

------
rasz_pl
Its a scam

We have brilliant entrepreneur coming up with revolutionary idea no one had
before(lol), sleek renders and good looking models, price point already set,
all that and ... absolutely ZERO tech behind it.

lets set so double the killer delete select all

------
Zklsalue8
Machine translation is so bad that I can't get excited.

------
nxzero
Always imagine everyone using tech like this, slowly using their own slang,
then something goes wrong, devices die, and no one understands the slang
languages each person now uses.

__

Person : Babel.

Person2: Babel?

Person : Babel!!

~~~
saalweachter
To a certain extent, this is equivalent to "imagine everyone's glasses fell
off and broke".

Sure, these devices are more complex and only a handful of people know how
they work, but by the time they spread through an entire civilization and we
adapted to be unable to communicate without them... they'd be as robust as
modern day glasses and you'd have repair services in every mall.

~~~
nxzero
Maybe, maybe not, but agree that your version of the future is just, if not
more, as possible.

That said, more complex things get, the more likely that something will be
missed, an error made, and/or unaccounted for due to its not having been seen
before. On the bright side, intentional disruption rarely have this sort of
impact.

------
bluesign
Or you can always use babel fish but it is a bit ticklish

------
ecolak
Nothing new here. As the article mentions, it's the Babelfish from the
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I've wanted to build one myself since I read
the book, but the fundamental problem of machines translating languages is
still a very hard problem. This thing won't work.

------
syngrog66
About a year ago someone tried hiring me to do this. At least to do research
and report back with recommendations.

On one hand I think we've never been closer to being able to create this kind
of product. On the other its still rife with complexity and edge cases.
Reality is messy.

------
chipotle2
if you type finnish into google translate, the results in english are pretty
bad.

furthermore, google translate only manages the "written" finnish language...
which nobody talks like. everyone uses "spoken" finnish which is not
translated at all in google translate.

i wonder how many other languages have this property.

------
anigbrowl
This product indeed sounds too good to be true but we'll probably have
something that delivers within 10 years. Add that to a virtual assistant and
the future could be very different. _Automatthew 's Friend_ by Stanislaw Lem
explores one possible scenario.

------
gwbas1c
I must admit that I'm highly skeptical. Show me a working app for my phone
that does voice translation, and then I'll believe that something like this
works.

------
johanneskanybal
"came up with the idea"

------
smilbandit
"The creator says he came up with the idea when he met a French girl." and
just like that he came up with the whole concept of real time language
translation, something the world has never even considered before /snark

~~~
Normal_gaussian
Annoyingly worded, but probably means "attained the drive for pursuing the
idea" instead.

If it was a more common realisation that it is not the idea but the drive that
is rare then we would have a lot fewer hot air inventors.

~~~
johanneskanybal
Well that's what makes it funny it's not even that it's just general
advancements in this area makes this a very natural thing to pursue.

------
kinai
For business yes, for private? No thank you, you'll lose a lot of knowledge,
understanding, mental skills by not trying to learn/understand a new language.

