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Comment by guiomie | Hacker News Reader

Watching these videos made me remember this cool demo Google did years ago where their earpods would auto translate in realtime a conversation between two people talking different languages. Turned out to be demo vaporware. Will this be the same thing?

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Aren't you talking about this? https://support.google.com/googlepixelbuds/answer/7573100?hl... (which exists?)

I think they're getting at the idea that it was demoed as a real time babelfish, where a conversation simple happened between two people wearing the devices. Instead it was a glorified spoken dropdown selector for choosing the language, and a press and hold mechanism that just tied into the existing phone app without any actual changes or upgrades to that already available translation mechanism. The thought was that you'd simply start talking to each other and hear the other in your language as you go - not speak a block all at once, stop, translate, play back from your phone to them, stop, let them speak a whole reply at once while the phone listens to them, stop, translate, hear their response in your earpiece. Which basically meant the device itself didn't bring much if anything to the table that couldn't be done with any other headphones and doing the language select and start/stop recording on the phone itself.

Meta ironically unveiled just this thing. An AI model that can translate in <2 seconds intended for use in real time conversation.

https://ai.meta.com/research/seamless-communication/

Yes it has a feel of coming from the same PR department as google glasses.

Maybe Robert Scoble will post pictures of himself using Gemini naked in the shower.

I also get this feeling. The demo videos feel heavily edited and fabricated rather than actual demos.

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