Pilot Earpiece - Translates Conversations In Real-Time - By Waverly Labs

[CCarter]

This is probably the coolest idea to come out in a while regarding human communication. It's an earpiece which you can utilize when speaking to someone to translate language in real-time while carrying on a conversation with a person speaking a different language. There are two earpieces that users utilize and from there you can talk all day with a person.

I think one of the biggest and last barriers to humanity is language. If we can understand each other better and hold conversations maybe, just maybe, there would be less global turmoil. So far I've been researching this field for a while and haven't found anything that excited me as much as this.

Even if this crowdsource flops the fact the idea is now out there is going to start the races for the innovators.

More info: This nifty earpiece will translate your conversations in real-time

Their main site: Waverly Labs

 

[Ryuzaki]

I love this kind of tech for two reasons:

• It offers unbelievable value to mankind for what will ultimately be pennies
• It freaks people out

A lot of inventors get their cues from sci-fi and fantasy, which often are extrapolations based on the obvious of what will come. For instance, one of the most high-fantasy, strange sci-fi books out there is The Bible.

As soon as RFID chips became a thing, it became obvious to do implants. But as soon as someone talked about implants in your hands to swipe your debit card, people freaked out over The Mark of the Beast, even though they'll happily do it with a mobile device in their hand (exact same thing). The fear is that they can cut your chip off and boom you can no longer buy or sell, just like in Revelations.

That's what I thought about in regards to this earpiece because the Anti-Christ is also supposed to be able to speak to you or make some speech to the entire planet, and no matter where you are or what language you speak, you'll hear it and understand it. This is how I'd pull that off if I was the Anti-Christ

Anyways, my point is that these advances are fun because of all of the push-back against something with incredible value for everyone. You can't even argue against it in any logical manner. If it's not religious fear then it's some kind of outrage against transhumanism. It's a blast to watch, because the upset people become your free-of-charge trillion dollar marketing machine.

 

[CCarter]

... Anti-Christ...

 

[miketpowell]

Good for them for getting anyone to give them any money. Great example how you don't need a new idea, just good marketing. This is a great gimmicky way of marketing a product that already exists to a broader audience that doesn't know about the product because they really don't need it but admire the neat concept.

Since you know, this exact product was built into Google Glass from the start. And there already is a ton of apps that will let you do exactly this if each person has a smart phone and BT headset for years now.

I used one with wife's relatives that only speak Chinese. I say something into my phone and it transcribes it into English so I can make sure it picked up what I said correctly. Then I push a button and it translates it to written Chinese on their phone as well as they can play the sound if they don't want to read it and want a computer voice to instead like this product.

So funny note story about translation space. When Google first entered the space the team didn't have any of the speakers of languages they were translating too. The first competition they went to to demo software the other teams mocked them. Google won hands down and changed the approach and thinking of the entire industry.

 

[Future State]

This tech has a long way to go. That's nowhere near real-time. It has to listen and translate and spit it back out. The real advancement will be when it can understand the context of the conversation, the syntax of all languages, and in effect have a "look-forward" algorithm that shortens the delay between hearing/translating/speaking to one second or less. It should be spitting out words into your ear fast enough that conversation doesn't pause or suffer. That'll happen eventually, but it'd require some serious local processing and data libraries all stored right there in the ear piece.

That or we need nanobot listeners stored all over everything and in everything that can report back shards that are close and constantly syncing with the master server, and then we need crazy wifi speeds available at all times that can go through concrete, etc.