In-Ear Device That Translates Foreign Languages in Real Time
boredpanda.com
boredpanda.com
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...
Your FAQ link isn't loading for me (hugged to death?) but I watched the video on the page HN links to here and I see nothing in it that's infeasible. As with any voice recognition and machine translation product, you'll probably need to be patient and tolerant of many errors, and I wouldn't be surprised if they gloss over that, but it could still be useful.
Edit: the FAQ finally loaded. I don't see anything particularly remarkable in there. There are no promises for battery life, speed, or accuracy. The basic premise of offline voice-to-voice translation is totally doable and has been done.
> "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."
I've recently been buying a lot of packages from Japan and found Google's camera translate to be surprisingly good. Bordering on sci-fi awesome.
As for voice recognition, that's something that's been consumer technology for a while. Smart TVs, mobile phones, home automation assistants, etc. It's pretty common technology now. Granted the results aren't 100%, they are still generally quite accurate - with the obvious caveats: depending on a person's accent and background noise.
> "No to mention issues like battery life"
That's a pretty minor point these days on devices with no LCD displays.
> 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)
They do say it depends on a smartphone app, so my assumption was it works in a similar way to the Pebble watch. ie it's essentially just a bluetooth speaker where the phone will push the data to it.
OCR of short sentences from invoices or similar and fluid speech recognition of often grammatically incorrect sentences are problems of a very different magnitude. OCR is easy in comparison of actually spoken speech recognition -- especially if it is supposed to run in real time
> As for voice recognition, that's something that's been consumer technology for a while. Smart TVs, mobile phones, home automation assistants, etc. It's pretty common technology now. Granted the results aren't 100%, they are still generally quite accurate - with the obvious caveats: depending on a person's accent and background noise.
and they simply suck for any language than english. its easier to talk to my devices in english than in german. and this is despite my poor pronunciations
>> "No to mention issues like battery life" > That's a pretty minor point these days on devices with no LCD displays.
not at that size. the power cell would have to be tiny
>They do say it depends on a smartphone app, so my assumption was it works in a similar way to the Pebble watch. ie it's essentially just a bluetooth speaker where the phone will push the data to it.
which would mean that they'd need bluetooth for permanent connectivity. this would drain the battery even more.
OCR isn't comparable to speech recognition. Period. The problem needs to be broken into two parts: 1) speech recognition, 2) translation. I was addressing those parts separately. However you're right that translating natural spoken language, which is full of grammatical errors and other nuances, would be a greater challenge than short passages of official documents.
> "and they simply suck for any language than english. its easier to talk to my devices in english than in german. and this is despite my poor pronunciations"
I'll have to take your word for it. But suffice to say there are several competing speech recognition engines, some better than others. So it might be that your devices use an engine that's poor at recognising German. Although equally you might be using one of the better engines. Hard to say from this high level overview. However the fact that they do work against your pronunciation of English is promising as it at least demonstrates how well these engines can cope with different accents - which is one of the hardest stumbling blocks in building speech recognition.
> "not at that size. the power cell would have to be tiny"
Indeed but we've already seen tiny power cells in watches and other modern gadgets. Given the earpiece only really needs a speaker, bluetooth receiver, some kind of DAC, and a battery; half the device could be the battery.
Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting this thing would have a great battery life though. But I still wouldn't be surprised if lasts a few hours - which is still comparable to some smart phones (sadly).
> "which would mean that they'd need bluetooth for permanent connectivity. this would drain the battery even more."
I did say it would need bluetooth. But realistically bluetooth doesn't suck that much power. The speaker would easily be a heavier power draw.
To summarise: there are obviously going to be difficulties - clear technical challenges - in build this kind of device. But I do think the technology is now at a stage were we can at least prototype something. And that was the crux of argument. The earpiece might not be a perfect gadget, but those gadgets who are first to market are seldom perfect.
I'm sure it's really just a specialized bluetooth headset, an app, and bunch of cloud services purchased from other vendors.
I think this type of technology is inevitable, but I think we're still 50 years away from it being ubiquitous.
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...
In real time this would be in English: See the big truck red? Driving very fast.
That's just scratching the surface with the most basic communication. There's simply no way this product can work with any real accuracy.
In real life, when you listen to a person, you do it simultaneous and, even more important, you anticipate what the other person will say. Right now machines can't do that - they even don't come near that.
Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjXpKz0BiIU
And a publication from 2008: http://isl.anthropomatik.kit.edu/cmu-kit/861_lt2007%281%29.p...
At one point, they had an app that did live-translation. But Facebook bought the tech and took it off the market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jibbigo
Today, they are riding the deep-learning wave to get ever better/faster recognition and translation. So huge improvements are to be expected.
[1] The professor, Alex Waibel, also has a chair at CMU.
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."
"Ravna had a theory (not that widely accepted, actually) that where beings have a common fluency, little else matters."
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.
Asking people to whore themselves on social media is becoming a new startup marketing strategy. I hate stuff like this.
New?
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.
This is a hard problem.
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 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!
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.
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.
Real-time translation of speech is difficult even for interpreters. They have to be aware of the context (in some cases specifically prepared beforehand, depending on the topic) and make assumptions based on human experience. You'd need to make a computer that can do that, too.
I suspect that a babelfish with current technology will work fine if you're listening to a prepared speech from a political leader, and poorly in actual social situations if people speak normally.
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.
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.
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)
You are right that lawyers scare the crap out of innovators though.
But in seriousness as well, my first kid cried a lot, and it's not a ln on/off switch - even if you're hugging and cuddling and comforting them, they will still cry for ten minutes because that's what kids do. It mostly just makes your job more difficult. My second son had lungs of an opera singer, and the noise made it physically unbearable for me to be near him when he needed help. I mean literally painful to my ears. There were more than a few times when I have had to leave him alone until his crying calms down or stops because I can't do anything for him.
Wearing sunglasses could be seen as either way. You are definitively dimming the raw luminous stimuli that reaches your eyes, but you could argue that your are not dullying your senses but just filtering a part of the spectrum with low signal-to-noise ratio, so your senses are enhanced as a result. Technology can be seen as an extension of human capacity. That's what tools are all about.
This thing in the ear, it does not give you beyond human capacities, neither helps you recover regular capacities you lost by whatever circumpstances. This just let you pay for the privilege of not having to develop your capacities to begin with.
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...
But no, "pilot". I guess yahoo copyrighted babelfish?
That shouldn’t be possible, and hopefully any court would laugh at whoever claims to have a trademark on Babelfish.
https://trademarks.justia.com/785/15/babelfish-78515910.html
https://trademarks.justia.com/772/49/babelfish-77249656.html
https://trademarks.justia.com/851/07/babel-fish-85107190.htm...
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.
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
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/03/google-translat...
This is probably far away from being able to translate languages perfectly, but still. The future came pretty fast.
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
__
Person : Babel.
Person2: Babel?
Person : Babel!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are multiple interpretations of a phrase like that. Choosing an obviously idiotic one leads to snarky internet comments, something we need less of on HN. Choosing the strongest one might lead you to post nothing or it might trigger a thoughtful response. Either way we get better signal/noise ratio, which is what we're hoping for here.