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.
> "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.
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.
I'm sure it's really just a specialized bluetooth headset, an app, and bunch of cloud services purchased from other vendors.
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.
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.
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...