3 ms·
It is kind of a UX curiosity. When people don't speak the same language, they are trained to have a third party "translator" to defer to. You speak, I watch y
by peeters 9y ago
It is kind of a UX curiosity. When people don't speak the same language, they are trained to have a third party "translator" to defer to. You speak, I watch you. Then I watch the translator. Then I speak, and so on.
That translator could be a person, a phone running Translate, a notepad you're drawing pictures on, whatever. The point is, you have something physical acting as the intermediary and so it's natural to direct your attention to it.
With the Pixel Buds, they're taking that physical manifestation away but the problem is under the hood nothing has changed. So you're still having this fragmented three-way conversation, but now there is no physical intermediary that makes it feel natural.
- chrisseaton 9y agoWhen you're trained to work with a translator, you're actually trained to not watch them - you keep eye contact with the other person the whole time and just listen to the translator, and it isn't a three-way conversation.
- peeters 9y agoGood point, and that's kind of where I'm coming from--when I said "people are trained" I meant implicitly, for regular people who would only encounter this rarely. So is this similarly just a question of user training to break from the "natural" interaction?
- cat199 9y agobut you still both know when the translator is speaking, and so to wait for the translation to finish, and can register facial expressions to gauge the effectiveness of the translated message in communicating what you are trying to say