Time to stop studying languages?

[rdearman]

http://www.boredpanda.com/real-time-translator-ear-waverly-labs/

[Teango]

Here's the source for this article.

"What languages are supported?

We are first introducing latin/romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, along with English) and will begin adding additional languages this fall, including Germanic, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Slavic and East Asian."

What...no Hawaiian??!! :/

[Xenops]

If you believe in the horrors of EMFs, language learning is the healthier option.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2016/01/20/emf-controversy-exposed.aspx

[Adrianslont]

No, not just yet. Without even trying it I'm pretty sure the tech is not up to scratch yet. And the limitations will be largely on the software/linguistics side.

And it will depend on your interlocutors having one, too. And my interlocutors tend to be poor - I note that South East Asian languages are not even listed as being in development.

Probably not in my lifetime but I am reasonably mature. Probably not long after I'm gone though.

Edit: added a sentence

[PeterMollenburg]

If you believe in the horrors of EMFs, language learning is the healthier option.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2016/01/20/emf-controversy-exposed.aspx

Tnx for sharing this. I'm a believer. There is a mountain of independent research out there showing just how bad EM radiation is.

[tastyonions]

Seems to be vaporware in any case: http://www.snopes.com/waverly-labs-pilo ... -language/

[tastyonions]

There is a mountain of independent research showing that the earth is flat and that NASA never put a man on the moon.

[emk]

http://www.boredpanda.com/real-time-translator-ear-waverly-labs/

Hah, no. I believe they're trying to raise money for crowd-funding. There's no guarantee that their product even exists, and if it does exist, there's no guarantee that it works acceptably.

A product like this has three parts:

1. Speech recognition. Imagine Siri or Android's voice search. These sort of work, but you do often need to repeat yourself and enunciate clearly.
2. Automatic translation. Imagine Google Translate. Again, this mostly works, especially on things like newspaper articles. It tends to fail miserably on complicated informal speech.
3. Speech synthesis. Again, imagine a typical smart phone. It's not horrible.

So let's hook up speech recognition, Google Translate, and speech synthesis. Now say something! Hey, cool, it just said something in French! And… huh, the other person is looking confused and a little upset. I wonder what happened? Now they just said something in French. My earpiece translates, "No but what do you tell?" (That's actual output, by the way.)

Oh, boy, this is going to be fun.

Actually, you can try this yourself today. Just download "Google Translate" for Android and click on the microphone icon. I've been having a conversation with myself here in French and English, and sometimes it mostly works. Other times it translates the exact opposite of what I said.

Now keep in mind that Google has enormous quantities of training data and they routinely win machine translation competitions. And they have giant stacks of cash. They're not some crowd-funded company who may or may not have a working prototype.

I'm trying to imagine having a dinner with my in-laws while they all speak rapidly to each other and I try to understand what's going on using an earpiece version of Google Translate's voice app. Or perhaps a party with extended family. Or trying to explain to a French advertising copywriter what I want a business advertisement to say. Or, worst of all, trying to write a sappy romantic note to my wife using automatic translation.

OK, sure, it's possible some day that automatic translation will become flawless and effortless. But for that to happen, computers will need to get a lot smarter, and they'll talk over far greater numbers of human jobs.

So let me express my frustration with automatic translation:

I say: "Ce truc est complètement bête." (This thing is completely stupid.)
Google Translate hears: "ce truc et complètement d'être"
Google Translate says: "This trick and complement to be"

I think point proves itself, actually.

[Aozora]

Never mind how poorly machine translations work for many language pairs. French<->English is kind of a best case scenario, if you try Japanese<->English it quickly becomes a mess.

[reineke]

Bah, humbug! If you're studying languages to conduct basic transactional conversations with Europeans, you can stop right now.

"Most of us have found ourselves in the awkward situation of trying to communicate in a foreign language. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s embarrassing. And sometimes it’s downright disastrous. But thanks to a new translation device that easily fits into your ear, the days of struggling to speak the local lingo might soon be a thing of the past."

Yeah, a piece of junk sticking out of your ear will fix all that...