"The creator says he came up with the idea when he met a French girl." and just like that he came up with the whole concept of real time language translation, something the world has never even considered before /snark
In-Ear Device That Translates Foreign Languages in Real Time
41–50 of 99 posts
Re: In-Ear Device That Translates Foreign Languages in Real Time
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 the kind of company I just don't want to deal with.
Reminds me of x.ai. You sign up, they put you on a huge "waitlist" that moves slowly, and periodically remind you that you can jump big chunks of that list by spamming people about the product on social media. Asking people to whore themselves on social media is becoming a new startup marketing strategy. I hate stuff like this.
> Asking people to whore themselves on social media is becoming a new startup marketing strategy.
New?
Re: In-Ear Device That Translates Foreign Languages in Real Time
#43"The creator says he came up with the idea when he met a French girl." and just like that he came up with the whole concept of real time language translation, something the world has never even considered before /snark
Annoyingly worded, but probably means "attained the drive for pursuing the idea" instead.
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.
Re: In-Ear Device That Translates Foreign Languages in Real Time
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me of x.ai. You sign up, they put you on a huge "waitlist" that moves slowly, and periodically remind you that you can jump big chunks of that list by spamming people about the product on social media. Asking people to whore themselves on social media is becoming a new startup marketing strategy. I hate stuff like this.
> Asking people to whore themselves on social media is becoming a new startup marketing strategy. New?
Among popular startups? The waiting list approach? New, at least for me.
Re: In-Ear Device That Translates Foreign Languages in Real Time
#45Sorry to sound so negative, but it seems something halfway between an April Fool and some Kickstarter "scam" (possibly in good conscience, but still).
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...
Re: In-Ear Device That Translates Foreign Languages in Real Time
#46I just don't see this working very well. The current language translation tools just are not good enough to support a proper conversation. Translating languages via technology is a hard problem and it's far from solved. Coupled with this fundamental problem is identifying speech accurately; something Siri fails to do regularly with my voice. If this thing gets built I am guessing it will be a novelty product.
Re: In-Ear Device That Translates Foreign Languages in Real Time
#47This isn't necessarily possible for any two random languages. Not every language has a SubjectVerbObject order like English, and even if it does, each language has its own quirks with how the words are ordered. For example in spanish "un pez grande" = "a big fish", but if you translate in real time it comes out as "a fish big". Of course, an interpreter can reword it as "a fish, which is big, ..." but this is not always possible.
Re: In-Ear Device That Translates Foreign Languages in Real Time
#48Machine translation is so bad that I can't get excited.
Re: In-Ear Device That Translates Foreign Languages in Real Time
#49I have a bad enough time getting Siri to understand my Aussie accent. Throw in something as inaccurate as Google Translate and you'll have... A pile of garbage really. 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…
The japanese version will be pretty terrible, I'd imagine. Too much homophones and ambiguous wording. "sounandayo!" = そうなんだよ "that's right!" = 遭難だよ "it's an accident!"
Re: In-Ear Device That Translates Foreign Languages in Real Time
#50I have a bad enough time getting Siri to understand my Aussie accent. Throw in something as inaccurate as Google Translate and you'll have... A pile of garbage really. 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…
I'm from Scotland, and on the rare occassions time I need to phone a US voice activated phone line (e.g. Expedia.com's), I have to put on a ridiculous American accent for the system to understand me.
This is a hard problem.