Translating earpiece

Foreign languages have always interested me since I started learning Spanish in 5th grade. I think it's so cool when someone can understand and speak multiple languages. It can be difficult and overwhelming though if you have no idea what somebody else is saying to you because you don't speak their language. In the future, however, this may not be as much of an issue. There is currently a campaign in order to raise funds for an earpiece that can recognize different languages and translate them in real time. It's called the Pilot, and it is a fascinating piece of technology. 

The piece works with the combination of speech recognition and typical translation technology. Speech recognition is an extremely complex area of computer science because it involves several other disciplines. Computers start by recording speech and turning it into a spectrogram to make it visual and easier to understand. Each sound shows up on the spectrogram differently. The computer is programmed to recognize these different sounds and piece them together to form whole words. This is a very basic explanation of a very basic kind of speech recognition, but computers can get much more complex. For example, computers can be programmed to predict the next word based on the previous word, in a way, to improve recognition. There are also much more advanced models that work similarly to a human brain to interpret speech. Ultimately, it is an extremely complex process that I can't fully understand. 

a spectrogram of some speech

The recognized speech is then sent to a smartphone app that will create a translation, and send that translation back to the earpiece. The earpiece then dictates the translation so the user can communicate effectively. All of this happens almost instantly so the conversation taking place can maintain a normal flow. 

This technology is so fascinating, although I don't think people will be as motivated to learn other languages when it becomes popularized if they know they can just buy 1 earpiece and app to understand every language.

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https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/meet-the-pilot-smart-earpiece-language-translator-headphones-travel#/

http://www.explainthatstuff.com/voicerecognition.html