The Waverly Pilot (翻译耳机)

Technology seems to be advancing daily, but the Pilot by Waverly Labs, the world’s first translation earpiece, might be a truly huge step forward for communication.

The product

Though the Pilot is still very much in development, the product will be sold as two earpieces and a smartphone app. When first released, the technology will translate between only five European languages -English, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese.【小题1】The app runs speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis processes before sending the new speech to the listener’s earpiece.

Applications

【小题2】The added convenience of these will make the device useful in several social spheres, particularly business and travel. While sales meetings and tourism may be revolutionized by the Pilot, the desire to communicate with a foreign crush inspired Waverly Labs’ CEO to develop it.

Sci-fi dreams coming true

【小题3】It reached its US$75,000 goal in 15 minutes, US$ 1 million in hours and eventually more than US$2 million with the help of over 11,000 backers. It seems that the Pilot captured the imagination of many who had seen similar technology in science fiction, like a Forbes writer expressed it in the following quote. “The Waverly Labs Pilot is as close as I’ve seen to the Universal Translator I was promised by Star Trek when I was a kid.”

Flying into the future

Though the Pilot’s translation app is available now, the entire earpiece package is planned for delivery in May 2017 at a retail cost of US$250 to $300.【小题4】Additional language packages will be developed and sold soon after the product’s release so that people everywhere can make use of this amazing device.