The Pilot Earpierce

This week, I'll be writing about a fairly futuristic piece of new technology. When I first heard of the Pilot earpiece, I was reminded of a science fiction book I read in elementary school in which aliens had chips that could be put on a tongue to translate languages instantly. The Pilot is not far off, as the earpieces operate similarly, albeit not quite as smoothly. Still, as a real world application of such an unbelievable idea, the earbuds are impressive. A sample video is embedded at the bottom of the blog.


The Pilot earpiece, which fits like an earbud.

The earpieces work by essentially combining speech recognition software and a speaking output function. Similarly to Apple's Siri, the earpiece identifies a voice and what it is saying as input. Then, it gets to work translating the input into the language of choice. This part is done with a bluetooth connection to a smartphone app. Once it has been successfully translated, the piece plays the sentence in the new language directly into the user's ear. On its surface, nothing about the device seems overly complicated as it is a fairly simple input/output relationship. The real challenge comes in achieving accuracy and capability when you consider not only how many languages there are, but also accents, idioms, and lack of clarity that occurs in standard conversations.

The Pilot is currently being crowdfunded, with potential buyers reserving pairs until the company has enough to begin mass production (likely in the spring). While the first version of the product will likely have its lags and hiccups, the potential of the earbuds in the future is exciting.

http://www.waverlylabs.com/#_overview
http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2016/05/17/pilot-translates-just-like-the-babel-fish/