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I can't imagine many people will want to put something in their ear that was just in someone else's ear..... Especially a stranger.... Good idea, poor form factor.

A small speaker to hold next to the ear for the other person sound more hygienic.

wet wipe. problem solved.

plus the earpiece is meant for more intimate communications. He mentioned that the software also works with the phone's speakers.
 
"It was difficult for us to communicate because she didn't speak English very well."
He's the one on vacation in a French-speaking country, but she's expected to know English?

English is the universal language.
 
I think what he means is expressed in the Justin Bieber song "What Do You Mean?" Pretty much how your partner says they're fine and nothing's wrong but that's not what they mean at all.


Not up to date on Beiber lyrics myself. But I think he was making crack at not understanding what women want or fully mean. But any device that would even be able to do that would for sure need to have no delay because we all know any slight pause in response back to the them would change whole outcome of conversation.
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Did you miss the part of the video where he explains holding the phone hinders natural communication? the earpiece allows for true "handsfree" communication.

Still would be nice as over the app translation to speak to family or in laws who do not speak same language as you over phone.
 
... users can hand off one of the earbuds to another person...

Um... gross.

Also, what am I missing? Isn't this just a pair of bluetooth headphones with a built-in microphone, like ones you can buy right now for $30? It's the software that has to keep up. The hardware seems essentially off-the-shelf.
 
The fun is actually in learning and using a foreign language, not listening to robot translations.

Or programming the robot.
Which is great, but doesn't help much in ad-hoc circumstances when time hasn't been spent on learning the language or at least learning it well enough to really hold a conversation that can sometimes be needed.
 
Which is great, but doesn't help much in ad-hoc circumstances when time hasn't been spent on learning the language or at least learning it well enough to really hold a conversation that can sometimes be needed.
For basic conversations, something like this will be OK, the next step in pocket translators.
 
I'll take "Things that won't work as advertised" for $500 Alex. This is a great concept, but international data is really expensive and English is extremely prominent around the world, especially anywhere even remotely touristy. I have never had a problem communicating when traveling.
 
Definitely an awesome idea! I hope it works as well in the real world as it seems like it does on the video.
 
The fun is actually in learning and using a foreign language, not listening to robot translations.

Or programming the robot.

Some of us have been on antihistamines our entire life... We no longer possess the capacity to learn new anything.

Also, the older you get, the less time you have to learn such things. For traveling, this would be great but not like it is. In intimate places, yes. Say for ordering food or buying a ticket somewhere, talking to a cab driver... Their needs to be an ear piece and then let the phone speaker translate what you say to the other person.

If you can just eliminate one translation, it would be great.

A quick purchase won't warrant the vendor wearing an ear piece. This might get you assaulted or arrested. Have a very special microphone in this thing and let it work with the phone speaker and it'll be a good deal. I'm just thinking of crowded areas where a lot of people are talking.
 
Nice, I need this so that I can understand my wife. I never get what she is talking about and we've been together 6 years already.

Since someone has already mentioned babblefish lets keep the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy theme going. She just needs a Point of View Gun. I know it is from the movie only.

I introduce the Point of View Gun
 
This reminds me of apple's introduction of seri. It sounded and worked like magic in their commercial but it was all a script matching seri capabilities. In reality it never works well but is frustrating at times.

Same thing here. It will work in some situations but it won't work in a noisy environment or music playing in background or other deep accents. But it's a welcome step forward.

When itranslate came out it had the ability to link two devices.
I had a "magical" conversation with my Chinese friend even though it got only 60% right it was a lot of fun.
But background noise or music or singing it didn't work.
I look forward to see how their app works and if it's better.
When super lte comes about and all this translation is done on a super computer it will be instant.
 
I'll take "Things that won't work as advertised" for $500 Alex. This is a great concept, but international data is really expensive and English is extremely prominent around the world, especially anywhere even remotely touristy. I have never had a problem communicating when traveling.

every major advancement in tech starts somewhere. I can't tell how many times while doing business here in NYC I wish I had something like this. so I didn't have to listen to people murder English. Just speak in your native language and let the tech translate.

Can he also program it for our sometimes horrid American language?
 
^ It's definitely a cool idea, and it will happen eventually. But as of now, I don't see this being viable. The internet connection and lag are the bottlenecks that will need to be resolved in my opinion. But it's a step in the right direction, hopefully they can make it work.
 
This is a great project. I don't know any foreign language strangers well enough to ask them to put some small and intimate in their ear, let alone in their tongue. If I did I would back this one straight away.

It is projects such as these that will eventually get the phone companies to provide consistent data connections across the country.

One thing I couldn't quite work out was whether the App already understood speech or whether it had to send everything off to a data farm to get translated.
 
As someone who is fairly bi-lingual, I can't help but think of this as being nothing but big promises with little to deliver. Languages are very complicated and machines are terrible at trying to decipher them.

Let's take this example. American English tends to use a lot of pop culture references in its humor. Someone might say, "No soup for you!" and then laugh and a French person wearing this device will hear "Pas de soupe pour vous!" hear someone laugh and be utterly perplexed.

In French, "terrible" can mean "great" or "terrible" according to the context. A computer won't really know and an English speaker using this device might hear "Wow, this new song you wrote is terrible!"
 
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