Pilot: Language Translator

  • iReviews
  • December 21,2016
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If you’re someone who isolates his or her travels to English-speaking destinations only, your world may have just opened up. If the only thing stopping you from seeing Versailles is not being able to speak French, there’s a solution. Pilot, a smart earpiece language translator, uses the latest in speech recognition technology to clearly understand other languages. Can you imagine living in a world without a language barrier or never having to worry about being lost in translation while traveling?

 

Whether you’re a doctor needing to understand a patient or an employee working for a multinational company, Waverly Labs has created a smart earpiece that allows wearers to speak different languages and still clearly understand one other. According to Waverly’s Indiegogo fundraising campaign, which has raised close to $3.8 million, “Pilot is the convergence of wearable technology plus machine translation.”

 

With an estimated delivery date set for May of 2017 and languages that include English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese, Pilot is poised to change the way we communicate across the globe. Equipped with an intuitive smartphone companion app, users can switch between languages and seamlessly upload the language of choice to your earpiece. If you’re traveling by train from Germany to France, just turn on your smartphone, go to your app, and switch the language preference. Since Pilot comes with two earpieces per order, just simply hand one of the earpieces to your French speaking friend and voilà, instant translation.

 

With a specially designed dual noise-canceling microphone and a powerful app, Waverly designed an innovative device that uses machine translation and speech synthesis to translate languages between people. Pilot’s smartphone app, for example, has a conference mode that allows multiple people to wear the earpiece and join in on the same conversation, no matter if you’re speaking Portuguese or Italian. By tapping into your speakerphone, you can easily communicate with everyone in your business meeting whether they’re in Madrid or Rome.

 

Waverly Labs, when creating Pilot, made sure to keep comfort at the forefront of their earpiece design. From three different sized ear tips to three distinct color choices, Pilot made sure its earpieces were fashionable and at the same time, ergonomic.

 

Now for the important question: Is the translation perfect? The answer is no. With different dialects, varying speaking styles, speeds, voice inflections, there is plenty of room for improvement. Since Pilot uses voice recognition technology, its translation software only gets better the more it’s being used. In other words, human interaction is critical to Pilot’s development. By improving its machine translation and speech synthesis technology, Pilot plans on adding German, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Slavic, East Asian, and African languages to the docket by fall of 2017.

PROS
  • Machine Translation Technology
  • Unobtrusive Design
  • Smart App Companion
  • Conference Mode
  • iOS and Android Compatible
  • Languages by May 2017: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese
  • Languages by Fall 2017: German, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian & Slavic, East Asian, African Languages
CONS
  • Availability
  • Translation Not Perfect
BOTTOM LINE