<story><title>Google Pixel Buds are wireless earbuds that translate conversations in real-time</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/10/google-pixel-buds-are-wireless-earbuds-that-translate-conversations-in-real-time/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kibwen</author><text>If you&amp;#x27;re a technologist looking for ways to save the world, enabling communication between people of different countries is about as important a task as you can find. The web was a good first step, but language is still a barrier. Being unable to communicate with someone dehumanizes them. Automatic translation isn&amp;#x27;t going to automatically bring about world peace (and it isn&amp;#x27;t going to automatically enable us to transcend cultural barriers),  but it&amp;#x27;s an enormously important next step.&lt;p&gt;I criticize Google and Microsoft a lot, and I will continue to do so when necessary, but I applaud their efforts toward this goal, especially since there&amp;#x27;s so little financial incentive to do so. Even if this product is as limited in practice as I suspect, it&amp;#x27;s heartening to see such crucial technology mature.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FractalNerve</author><text>Is all voice in a room with a person wearing Google Buds transmitted to the cloud??&lt;p&gt;Isn&amp;#x27;t that prohibited and eavesdropping onto unsuspecting citizens?&lt;p&gt;I mean it&amp;#x27;s not just temporarily processed and immediately deleted afterwards. That&amp;#x27;s Google trying to get WiFi SSIDs, (Satellite, Street, Indoor, Face, Object) Pictures, Voices, real-time Geo-Location of consumers and whatnot.. it&amp;#x27;s getting off the hand..&lt;p&gt;I was shocked when I first discovered that my &amp;quot;ok, Google&amp;quot; conversations were stored in the cloud indefinitely with a badly designed and hidden Web-UI that allows &amp;quot;deletion&amp;quot; (whatever that legally means with Google-speak).</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Pixel Buds are wireless earbuds that translate conversations in real-time</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/10/google-pixel-buds-are-wireless-earbuds-that-translate-conversations-in-real-time/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kibwen</author><text>If you&amp;#x27;re a technologist looking for ways to save the world, enabling communication between people of different countries is about as important a task as you can find. The web was a good first step, but language is still a barrier. Being unable to communicate with someone dehumanizes them. Automatic translation isn&amp;#x27;t going to automatically bring about world peace (and it isn&amp;#x27;t going to automatically enable us to transcend cultural barriers),  but it&amp;#x27;s an enormously important next step.&lt;p&gt;I criticize Google and Microsoft a lot, and I will continue to do so when necessary, but I applaud their efforts toward this goal, especially since there&amp;#x27;s so little financial incentive to do so. Even if this product is as limited in practice as I suspect, it&amp;#x27;s heartening to see such crucial technology mature.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>GuiA</author><text>In practice, it&amp;#x27;s doubtful that this feature of the product will be that useful.&lt;p&gt;Google Translate still fails at very basic grammatical constructs, despite all the deep learning machinery they recently upgraded to (one of my favorite examples being the extremely simplistic &amp;quot;my cousin and her wife&amp;quot;, which a 5 year old would properly parse, and yet gets erroneously translated to e.g. &amp;quot;mon cousin et sa femme&amp;quot; in French, when it should be &amp;quot;ma cousine et sa femme&amp;quot; (inferred from the her)). For corpuses in languages that are closely related (e.g. Swedish and English which they showed on stage), you generally get fairly usable results, which are acceptable for getting the general meaning of a news article but would get frustrating quickly for a real life conversation. For languages that are not closely related, the tech is just plain unusable.&lt;p&gt;People who need to work with multiple languages professionally will never use this - too many nuances would be lost, and too many mistakes would be made. The UN is not getting rid of its army of translators any time soon.&lt;p&gt;On the other end of the spectrum, people who punctually need to use a foreign language (e.g. because they are visiting a country for a few weeks) don&amp;#x27;t have that much of a pain point. When my French parents visit foreign countries, they communicate with the locals in broken English and by pointing and gesturing. Sure, there might be a bit of friction there, but there&amp;#x27;s nothing that this approach doesn&amp;#x27;t get them that this product would. Not to mention that speaking to someone while wearing earbuds looks plain rude, and that you can only really have a 2 way conversation if they also are wearing these earbuds, which 99.9% of the world won&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;It certainly makes for a very cool demo, but as a product it doesn&amp;#x27;t really have much of a place.</text></comment>