Comments

1
Stop it! I can't handle any more awesome today!
2
O_O
3
Jealous! My iphone doesn't have a video camera...
4
I'm no longer upset about flying cars and jet packs.
5
That is so cool and I would really use something like that, but my cell phone CAN NOT do that. If you saw my old (really old, like 8 years old) POS out of date cell phone you'd laugh your ass off.

But hey, I can make and receive calls and a text occasionally so I'm okay with it.
7
Yes, yes, but can it translate her clothes away?
8
7 is correct.
9
@5: I was rocking a StarTAC until earlier this year.
10
too bad it's a poor translation. "y va en la otra dirección" is what it should say.
11
@10: Waaaah! The magic instatranslator that turns iPhones into BabelFish isn't perfect! Waaaaah!

(Here's a real legitimate waaaah: I have an Android phone. Fucking iPhone gets all the cool shit.)
12
It also isn't real. It's a video of a phone playing a video in front of a woman who is matching the movement of the video on the phone with cards in a different language.

But all you old people are so cute when you're credulous!
13
Ben @9, I don't even know what that is which should tell you how out of date I am when it comes to electronics. But I can tell you that I can't even get a battery anymore for my old Samsung whatever it is. So when this one dies I'm gonna have to break down. If I'm out in public somewhere, you should see the look on people's faces when I take it out to make or receive a call. Priceless!

And then there was the time my 3 year old niece asked me what I was using one day. Everyone in my family couldn't stop laughing. It's hard being lame.
14
@12: Wrong.
15
@12, it's not even real? Oh crap, I'm lamer than I thought.

Hey, who you calling old? Them's fighting words youngin.
16
I LOVE living in the future.
17
@12 - Wut? Anyone with a brain can figure out that EVEN IF IT'S A HOAX, your claim is false. The woman is matching the video? With the EXACT SAME FINGER POSITIONS?

I'm pretty sure she was involved in the moon landing fake film, too.
18

But all you old people are so cute when you're credulous!


Coming from somebody who based his opinion on a small segment of the video and didn't bother checking his facts, this is pretty funny.
19
@12: No, it's not fake, but like commercials, the set-up is made to show it in the best possible light (i.e. clear text, content that makes sense once translated, etc.).

See the examples of using it here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php…
20
Saw it on Macrumors and I have to say sweet!!!

Here's another legitimate waaaah: I am on Verizon. Although I could just get an iPod Touch. I really want one.
21
Okay, all that really matters is that you don't order the tongue, or swim with the sharks, right? I mean, let's assume this isn't for your work at the UN.
22
Although it is a bit selective in it's translation

http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php…
23
@6: Nice. It parsed "alto" (high) as "ano" (anus). Needs some work deciphering the camera feed.
24
yeah, there's a LOT more work that needs to be done in translations and voice to text -- very related. believe me, I have a vested interest in this stuff and follow it pretty closely.

still, a very slick commercial and the more work's done in these fields, the better. if y'all want other examples of real time translation, try the autocaptioning feature in youtube and note how it works very well under some conditions, and returns LSD-inspired woo-woo under others...
25
And what's wrong with learning a new language instead of depending on a piece of equipment that does a shit job?
26
Just downloaded this to my phone. It's free! I could absolutely see spending $10 or more on an app like this for traveling, but they're just giving it away.
27
And just ran it, the dictionary functionality is $5 each way in-app. Not quite as cool anymore.
28
Machine language translation has been improving -- I've been a little involved in it at one point myself -- and we just may end up having the Babel Fish someday. No it won't be perfect, and people will still have to check it (even those awesome statistically based translation algorithms with their 100-million sentence database to determine phrase frequency correlations from also make mistakes a lot of the time -- just look at GoogleTranslate). But it's been getting better and better, and I don't see a reason why it should stop.

As for making it part of the video -- looks cool, as if it were magically changing objects in the real world, but that's actually not hard to do (I saw an ap that deforms people's shape just like those old oddly shaped mirrors did). Nooo, the simple translation task is way more difficult, and theoretically interesting.
29
"I'm sorry, I don't speak Spanish. Can you write what you're saying down on these 8x10 cards?"
30
I spent some time on a Greek island in August and was able to chat with some folks at my campground using my ipod touch and google translate. It was awesome. There's only so far you can get with pointing and waving.

@25 I visited 5 countries in 5 weeks and picked up just a few words in each...surely you don't think people should only visit places where they speak the language? I say use every tool you got. The better your communication, the richer your experience.
31
Cracker Jack @12: I hope they carve 'But all you old people are so cute when you're credulous!' on your tombstone.
32
It's a word-by-word translation, it's not a very good substitute for a quality translator - it can't account for context or change the syntax of a sentence.

But still pretty cool. But not good enough that I would buy it (as someone with a decent understanding of Spanish).
33
@ 30 No, I'm not saying that. I've visited plenty of countries without knowing a single word of the language. I got along by analogy with the two languages I knew, realized It was easy to learn what was necessary to start a conversation, and that motivated me to learn a few more languages.

Having also worked in the tourist industry for five or six years, I know that most people who rely on technology actually LIMIT their experience to what the technology can do for them. So there's less interaction and understanding in the end (in most cases). In other words, the attitude is "why speak to a local if I've got this wonderful tool that translates everything." What a boring way to travel. A textbook example of how to miss the point.

But what was my point, exactly, you may ask? That it's fun and not that hard to use our brain once in a while instead of hoping for a magical tool to do the thinking for us. Many people complain about the general dumbing down of Western culture, but if you always rely on technology instead of human capacity, as we are wont to do, we increasingly limit that capacity to what the technology allows or enables us to do. The medium is, indeed, the message.
34
This looks awesome! But i just tried to DL it and it requires 4g. Lame.
35
I bought it as soon as I saw the video. It is cool technology, but they're using a built-in translation engine that only does literal, word-by-word translations. The Spanish is slightly worse than Peggy Hill's. On the plus side, it doesn't use any data (unlike Google Translate, etc.) so when you're overseas you don't have huge roaming bills. If they gave the option of using an online service it would be more accurate but you'd have to wait for it to do the OCR, send it off for translation, wait for it to come back, losing the instant response of what they have now. I'm sure it will get better.

@11 and other Android people: download Talk to Me from the Android Market. You can speak to it in about a dozen different languages and it will speak back the translated results. Same-same but different.

36
Because learning another language is just too much! God people are lazy, wait, I mean Americans are lazy because we just expect everyone to know English, ego-maniacal!

Please wait...

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