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Sorry to sound so negative, but it seems something halfway between an April Fool and some Kickstarter "scam" (possibly in good conscience, but still). Both voi

by Kurtz79 10y ago

Sorry 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-launch-date/ http://www.waverlylabs.com/2016/05/faqs-about-early-bird-and...

dclowd9901 10y ago
Meanwhile, Bragi's wireless headphones have a microphone for pass-thru audio, and bluetooth connectivity. Coupled with a smartphone, I'm curious why an app for this doesn't already exist?
mikeash 10y ago
Jibbigo was doing decent voice-to-voice translation entirely locally back in the iPhone 3GS days. You still had all the usual pitfalls of voice recognition and machine translation, but it was good enough to be useful. 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.
ma2rten 10y ago
Maybe they are using Google translate and Google speach api?
- hangonhn 10y ago
  Those APIs aren't free and the lag between the translation and network connectivity means it would be very difficult to have a real time conversation.
laumars 10y ago
I can understand your cynicism but I think this kind of product is possible. Maybe not perfect, but that the our consumer technology is already mostly there albeit not unified just yet. I'll explain by addressing some of your concerns: > "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.
- y4mi 10y ago
  >> "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. 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.
wvenable 10y ago
All the technology to do this already exists. I have speech-to-text on my Pebble watch -- it goes up to a server, is processed, and is returned all relatively quickly. So you combine that with text translation tools that have existed for years and then text-to-speech. I'm sure it's really just a specialized bluetooth headset, an app, and bunch of cloud services purchased from other vendors.
squizzel 10y ago
It's not even a good enough scam to be on Kickstarter.
russelluresti 10y ago
I'm also skeptical. This is a problem where it's fairly easy to get 80% there but nearly impossible to get 100% there. Most speech recognition apps have trouble with thick accents. From there, imagine stumbling speech or people who change their thoughts in the middle of a sentence. Then there's the lag between input and output - you often can't translate a phrase or sentence until you know the whole thing and then you're adding computer computation time onto it. I think this type of technology is inevitable, but I think we're still 50 years away from it being ubiquitous.
- Swizec 10y ago
  Nevermind thick accents. What about languages that have tens, even hundreds, of dialects? 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_dialects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_dialects#List_of_diale... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_French https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_French
  - Kalium 10y ago
    In South Texas, I once encountered a man speaking English with a very strong Acadian accent. I had to listen to him speak for several minutes before I even realized that what he was speaking was in fact English. Accents and dialects are incredibly complex.
macco 10y ago
Realtime is not possible (right now). You allways have to wait for the voice recognition and then you translate. 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.
- laumars 10y ago
  The promo video wasn't true real time either though. They just has the translate services running after each speech had concluded. So I think by "real time" they just mean "automatically".
jpfr 10y ago
At my university (KIT in Germany [1]), they developed such a system and apply it for live-translation of lectures for international students. Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjXpKz0BiIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjXpKz0BiIU And a publication from 2008: http://isl.anthropomatik.kit.edu/cmu-kit/861_lt2007%281%29.pdf 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 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.

by Kurtz79 10y ago

dclowd9901 10y ago

Meanwhile, Bragi's wireless headphones have a microphone for pass-thru audio, and bluetooth connectivity. Coupled with a smartphone, I'm curious why an app for this doesn't already exist?

mikeash 10y ago

Jibbigo was doing decent voice-to-voice translation entirely locally back in the iPhone 3GS days. You still had all the usual pitfalls of voice recognition and machine translation, but it was good enough to be useful. 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.

ma2rten 10y ago

Maybe they are using Google translate and Google speach api?

hangonhn 10y ago
Those APIs aren't free and the lag between the translation and network connectivity means it would be very difficult to have a real time conversation.

laumars 10y ago

I can understand your cynicism but I think this kind of product is possible. Maybe not perfect, but that the our consumer technology is already mostly there albeit not unified just yet. I'll explain by addressing some of your concerns: > "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.

y4mi 10y ago
>> "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. 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.

wvenable 10y ago

All the technology to do this already exists. I have speech-to-text on my Pebble watch -- it goes up to a server, is processed, and is returned all relatively quickly. So you combine that with text translation tools that have existed for years and then text-to-speech. I'm sure it's really just a specialized bluetooth headset, an app, and bunch of cloud services purchased from other vendors.

squizzel 10y ago

It's not even a good enough scam to be on Kickstarter.

russelluresti 10y ago

I'm also skeptical. This is a problem where it's fairly easy to get 80% there but nearly impossible to get 100% there. Most speech recognition apps have trouble with thick accents. From there, imagine stumbling speech or people who change their thoughts in the middle of a sentence. Then there's the lag between input and output - you often can't translate a phrase or sentence until you know the whole thing and then you're adding computer computation time onto it. I think this type of technology is inevitable, but I think we're still 50 years away from it being ubiquitous.

Swizec 10y ago
Nevermind thick accents. What about languages that have tens, even hundreds, of dialects? 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_dialects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_dialects#List_of_diale... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_French https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_French
- Kalium 10y ago
  In South Texas, I once encountered a man speaking English with a very strong Acadian accent. I had to listen to him speak for several minutes before I even realized that what he was speaking was in fact English. Accents and dialects are incredibly complex.

macco 10y ago

Realtime is not possible (right now). You allways have to wait for the voice recognition and then you translate. 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.

laumars 10y ago
The promo video wasn't true real time either though. They just has the translate services running after each speech had concluded. So I think by "real time" they just mean "automatically".

jpfr 10y ago

At my university (KIT in Germany [1]), they developed such a system and apply it for live-translation of lectures for international students. Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjXpKz0BiIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjXpKz0BiIU And a publication from 2008: http://isl.anthropomatik.kit.edu/cmu-kit/861_lt2007%281%29.pdf 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 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.