High Level review (no rating yet) of the Pilot Voice translation earbuds…

A concept I have been rolling around for awhile, the B’s of Security (Be careful, Be secure) also adds a new concept, bandwidth. The B’s of security is a concept I will expand in a future column.

I’ve been playing with the pilot earbuds quite a bit. The pilot is a voice translation system that also acts as earbuds for your cellular phone. The first thing I will note is that the Spanish channel I have access to doesn’t speak Spanish in learning mode. It speaks Spanish in fluent native speaker mode, so it is a good test. The other advantage of that channel is that the option to put English on the screen as closed captioning is there. Turn on the TV, face away from the screen and let Pilot translate. Then go to the DVR< and relaunch the show, watch the closed caption and see how well the translator is doing. Overall the translation rate for native speaking Spanish translation

The correct translation rate, which is a modified statistic I’ve created (100 words spoken, 78 correctly translated) allowed me to consider the next tier of translation, and that was the “understanding” rate. Understand is do you hear enough of the intent that you understand the communication. The answer to that using Pilot is yes, note that you have to tell people to speak in learning mode when it is critical. Learning mode is the rate a Spanish teacher speaks at, not a native speaker. Based on the “fluency” of the communication overall the translation is pretty good. I suspect the more you wear and use the system the faster and more accurate it will be overall. I haven’t tried the system as a standard set of phone earbuds yet.

I still, to this day, remember the old universal Translator on Star Trek the original series. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. Spending time out of the country (when I was a child we lived in Thailand) got me thinking about communication a lot. The nature of communication is something that is critical for people. I know that there are times when my halting Spanish isn’t good enough to comfort a crying lost child.I know because I have tried. Plus that is a child I encountered that was crying in a language I understand. I couldn’t imagine how hard it would be to try to comfort a child in a language I didn’t know at all. As the pilot software improves, I am hoping that more and more languages will make the universal transaction a reality!