I am not ashamed to say that I am a Sci-Fi geek. I can’t get enough of fantastical space based fantasies. This love of Sci-Fi is the main reason I get super excited whenever a new gadget comes out. Well not every new gadget. I get super excited when whenever a new gadget comes out that I’ve seen before on TV or in the Movies. I am ridiculously excited right now because one of the most iconic Sci-Fi gadgets ever is now a reality. Well almost.
With Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s Babel Fish and Star Trek’s Universal Translator Sci-Fi gave us a view into a future here we’d be able to communicate with almost any being from almost anywhere in the galaxy. Well Translate One2One is giving us a view of that very future right now.
Using IBM Watson’s Natural Language Processor and Language Translation protocols Australian startup Lingmo International have developed an earpiece that can translate languages in almost real time. The earpiece has an inbuilt microphone, which means it can pick up spoken words and then translate them across English, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German, and Chinese.
Unveiled this month in Geneva at the United Nations Artificial Intelligence for Good Summit the Translate One2One earpiece is the first language translator than can work without an internet connection.
I’m blown away by this, especially considering the price. It is $179 for a One2One headset or only $229 for a 2 piece travel set. I would love the chance to walk around parts of the world offering my second headset to natives of foreign lands and watching the looks on their faces as they comprehend that we can understand each other.
This world we live in and the technical marvels it continues to serve up makes me smile all the time. Not least because I’m always being reminded that tomorrow has never been closer to today.
Via: Lingmo