Google’s Pixel 2 event in San Francisco on Wednesday had a lot of stuff to show off and most of it was more of the same: the next iteration of the flagship smartphone, new Home speakers and various ways of entwining them more deeply into your smart home, a new laptop that’s basically a Yoga running ChromeOS and a body camera that I’m sure we’ve seen somewhere before. Yawn. We saw stuff like this last time and are sure to see more of it again at next year’s event.
But tucked into the tail end of the presentation, Google quietly revealed that it had changed the world with a pair of wireless headphones. Not to be outdone by Apple’s Air Pods and their wirelessly-charging TicTac storage case, Google packed its headphones with the power to translate between 40 languages, literally in real-time. The company has finally done what science fiction and countless Kickstarters have been promising us, but failing to deliver on, for years. This technology could fundamentally change how we communicate across the global community.
This is a momentous breakthrough, to say the least. Just 20 years ago, if you wanted to have a passage of text translated using the internet rather than tracking down someone that actually spoke the language, you likely did it through Altavista’s Babel Fish. Launched in 1997, it supported a dozen languages but often returned translations that were barely more intelligible than the text you put in. Over the next couple of decades, translation technology steadily improved but could never compete with natural language speakers for accuracy or speed.