The Babel fish has arrived. Sort of.

An artificial-intelligence powered earpiece that can translate spoken conversations has gone on sale for $179 (£140). Developed by Australian startup Lingmo International, the Translate One2One uses IBM Watson's natural language understanding technology to understand both the words and context being spoken, before purportedly delivering a near-instant translation.


Languages are dying, but is the internet to blame? Language Languages are dying, but is the internet to blame?

The earpiece doesn’t rely on Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to translate conversations, meaning it can be used on airlines and in remote areas. The device can translate conversations across English, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German and Chinese provided both speakers are wearing an earpiece. More, like Indian English will eventually be added.

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According to Lingmo, the use of IBM Watson helps the device overcome common translation hurdles such as regional dialects. For example in Spanish "ll" could be pronounced "y", "j" or "sh", depending on the dialect.

"We believe it'll be everyone from travelers to small and mid-sized businesses to enterprises," founder and director of Lingmo International, Danny May, told WIRED. "In the digital age, business and society is truly global. Current translation apps really struggle with the natural language and conversational context, often just literal word-for-word translation which, more often than not, translates inaccurately.


"At a simple level, I might be using slang to say 'that's cool' and it'll translate to 'that's cold'," May said.

The earpiece was unveiled at the United Nations AI for Good summit in Geneva, Switzerland last week. It's now available to buy for $179 with shipping starting in July. Other similar devices are being developed, such as Waverly Lab’s translation earpiece Pilot, shown at Mobile World Congress this year. But Translate One2One is the first to go on sale.

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May decided to take on other machine learning translation services such as Google Translate after an embarrassing experience in China. Rather than saying to a police offer “hello, how are you?” he instead blurted out: “Hello, I love you”. Soon after, in 2013, his startup released their first translation service which was used via an app.

"Anyone who's traveled will have found themselves in a similar scenario of incorrect translation, while realising the social benefit of being able to converse across cultures," May said. But it won't just enhance travel experience and understanding across cultures, it'll help small business too. "There is an estimated £48 billion lost in business opportunity each year due to language and cultural barriers. Particularly among small and medium businesses looking to expand who may not have resources for expert translators, this play a big role in helping bridging that gap of lost opportunity."

In addition to the translation earpiece, customers can download the app version, which also includes a currency converter.