No details yet other than the website hinting that there's an app for a smartphone. Sort of like Siri or Cortana then apparently but it claims "offline". I shudder to think about the memory requirements for this. On the plus side if it works, you can have a conversation but the downside is, you have to give them the other earpiece. Eww....
Electric Babel Fish swims into crowdfunding
A company called Waverly Labs claims to have developed a real-time-in-ear translation unit. Just how the “Pilot” pulls off the trick hasn't been fully explained on the company's site or the saccharine video that purports to show the device in action. What we can say is that the material released so far depicts two wireless …
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Thursday 19th May 2016 08:32 GMT DropBear
I don't see the problem (or much contribution on their part, to be honest): Google Translate already does text-to-text translation between a fair number of languages, and it has an option to download often-used languages for offline use; I have several downloaded on a half-decade old phone and I'm not even noticing it's there. Obviously, one only needs to add voice recognition and text-to-speech to complete the circuit - no idea whether something doing just that already exists or not, but neither technology is exactly stranger to smartphones nor has been for a long, long, long time now. So, while it might sound impressive, I'm certainly underwhelmed by the "achievement"...
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Thursday 19th May 2016 12:55 GMT PatientOne
Speech to text exists (we're using it) but it needs configuring, training (to understand the person speaking) and context tuning to get it even vaguely right. It's not perfect meaning it requires a human being to review and verify what was translated to text matches what was said.
Translating between written languages isn't difficult if you have the entire text to translate as you have context but even then you can get some very humourous translations and you can't translate word by word between many languages due to the way they are constructed and the rules that are required, so you need a delay between speech and translation simply to assemble enough of what was said to make sense of it and produce a meaningful translation.
Reading it back is the easy bit.
Or, if you know someone who does speech translation, ask them how they do it and what the pitfalls are, and that's using a system that cheats constantly (the human brain).
So, in this instance, I'm inclined to say this is another of those wonderful ideas where they're expecting more of technology than is possible. Unless they accept there will be a noticable delay between speaking and translation, and probably a longer delay than if they had someone else do the translation for them (with less accuracy, too).
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Thursday 19th May 2016 07:31 GMT Mage
Seems misleading
I saw this on newspaper sites.
1) Google Translate and Skype etc are only good to translate to your own language, and then poor
2) You need phrases etc for context. Word by word doesn't work, so latency.
3) Bet anything it's just a wireless earbud, likely bluetooth.
4) It MIGHT run on phone, this is unlikely, probably the phone just connects earpiece and microphone to a remote server.
Nothing to see. This won't be in-ear translation. What ever it is won't be better than Skype, QQ or Google Translate and worse than the text interface to those as there is the addition error prone voice recognition.
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Thursday 19th May 2016 08:21 GMT Paul Naylor
Have to
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen it to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something 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 therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.
Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.
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Thursday 19th May 2016 11:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
Dubious
Hmmm, I'm very dubious. Google translate already does a very good job with speech-to-speech translation using the translate app on a phone. The speech-to-text, text translation then text-to-speech all work well. My English parents and Italian in-laws can manage a reasonable conversation even through they share no language.
I can't believe a small untested outfit will be able to exceed the performance of Google or Microsoft in this regard. Even if this company is planning to just re-use the Google or Microsoft tech to make this work I don't see the point with the in-the-ear solution. When holding a phone between speakers is pretty adequate. Maybe in the future when problems regarding power requirements and speed of the translation are resolved it would be good to have something unobtrusive in-the-ear way but probably by then we'll be hardlining stuff into our brains anyway
hes
S and others
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Thursday 19th May 2016 14:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
How to get in on these scams...
1. Get a junk MBA and some fancy PR blurb
2. Promise a brand new secret tech soon to be worth billions
3. Put up a website with pseudo-scientific/outlandish bullshit
4. Get some free interns with STEM degrees desperate for work, and prepared to lie to keep it
5. Ask the VC science-illiterate community for millions of dollars
6. Talk a load of shite promising a break thru soon
7. Ask for even more money whilst delivering nothing
8. PROFIT
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Thursday 19th May 2016 18:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: How to get in on these scams...
(5) is more like "get some intermediaries to brag cash out of VCs" - promise them 15% of what they bring (which is 10% over market) and they'll promise whatever it takes to get their share of the loot, which also means you cannot be held responsible for their claims.
(5a) would be "pay yourself a million dollar salary" á la uBeam.
Gotta plan ahead ..
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Thursday 19th May 2016 15:51 GMT d3vy
Original :" I can't see this working as advertised."
ENG -> German : "Ich kann mich nicht um diese Funktion zu sehen wie in der Werbung."
And back again : "I can not to see this function as advertised."
And that's one simple sentence.. Yeah - you can just about figure out what it means, but that's with it written and reading it over once for context then the second time to understand it - if its shouted into your lughole by a robotic voice how likely are you to get it? (Just the robotic voice alone will make it hard enough).
There is the second issue of course that you will be hearing two streams, One language in one ear and translated English in the other off set by a few seconds - I can see that getting really confusing.
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Thursday 19th May 2016 18:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
Oh, this will get definitely funded, no doubt
Can you imagine ANY agency passing up the chance to be handed conversations throughout the world on a golden platter? Whatever it takes, this will get funded one way or the other.
(Yes, I'm paid to be paranoid. Sadly I've been proven right far too often this year :( ).
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Thursday 19th May 2016 23:43 GMT John Brown (no body)
And one day...
We'll all have a blue flashing LED earbud in each ear. We'll all pause every Tuesday at 9am while the latest updates are downloaded, we'll all get our news through it. Everyone will laugh at the same time at the same joke of the day. Until the plan is complete then everyone will be upgraded. Or deleted!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
