AI in your ear — stop learning langauges
Google is one of those companies that one can never truly see for what they are. There’s no denying that serving you adds and collecting your personal data to do so more efficiently is happening daily, whether you like it or not. The pill is, however, becoming progressively easier to swallow with each announcement from the Mountain View giant, and it’s not necessarily something to be ashamed of. The justification for that are the company’s ever increasing efforts in the field of Artificial Intelligence, which might be the closing gap in communication across languages.
I have no intention to pull the wool over your eyes, in a perfect world, Google’s goodies would be available for free, no strings attached, but things simply don’t work this way in our version of the universe. Maybe that’s because I’m the member of younger generation and don’t value my privacy as much as a sane person would, but I honestly am willing to trade some of my secrets in exchange for access to mind-blowingly useful tools and services. Cast the first stone people who have never used Google Maps on a vacation, or Google Translate on that sweet, sweet trip to Croatia when buying a bottle of shampoo proved more difficult than one could imagine.
On October 4th the Mountain View giant has held an event to showcase the second generation of Google-branded hardware, with new Pixel phones taking the spotlight. What caught my eye (and ear), however, was the smallest product this company has released to date — the Pixel Buds. A set of Bluetooth earbuds aimed to compete directly with Apple’s AirPods is going through some major bumps on its road to an extremely distant finish line called ‘success’. The main obstacles on that journey are, besides steep pricing, unintuitive ways of controlling music playback, like voice-only command to skip to next or previous song. Despite all of that, I see this product as an incredible piece of technology.
So, what’s there to be excited about? Well, I wanted to talk about Google’s translation service, and I have introduced the wireless earbuds first, as those two come together with none other than the Pixel Buds. Connect them to your phone, put them in our ears and fire up the Translate app. This is all the preparation you will need, after that you can start talking. Talking? But what for? You are on your trip to Croatia, right? The train station is in another part of the city and internet is not helpful for some reason so it’s time to ask the locals for directions. You don’t need to know the language, simply bring your finger to the touch-sensitive area on your earbud and ask the question, your phone will then ask your question in Croatian through its speakers, like magic. To get the answer, a helpful passer-by that you’ve just stopped will have to simply tell the directions, which in turn will be translated and played in your ear. The description of the whole process might sound more complicated than the actual bilingual conversation is in real usage, but no matter how organic the whole experience might be, one question needs to be asked. Why do I need to buy the Pixel Buds to start using this feature? And the answer is — you don’t. Honestly, this functionality is baked in the Google Translate app itself and works equally as amazing. Well that’s just nonsense, a shameless money grab! Why would I buy them anyway? Convenience. Convenience of having an AI-powered assistant right there for you.
Last year the Google Home — a smart speaker — was introduced to the world, and one may wonder about its purpose if all it does is answer users’ queries the same way that Google Assistant does on the phone. It is, however, convenient to have a device that’s always available for you to ask about the weather, or to play your favorite Spotify playlist, without ever having to worry about charging it. Where Pixel Buds shine is their effortless integration of Google Assistant into your daily habit of downing out the noises of the city with that sweet Arctic Monkeys album. Missed a train? Decided to grab a coffee on your way to the office? Just ask, no need to take the phone out of your pocket, unlock it and only then perform that same action.
One might argue that the price of $159 is too high for speeding up the process by 10 seconds, but the whole idea of wearables is, sadly, not to be cheap, but to be useful, and the same applies to smartwatches. These have now successfully replaced the good and trusted wristwatches simply because they can offer so much more than just telling the time. If you could reimagine the headphones, would you hesitate? Google didn’t, and for all the right reasons.
Izabela Błażowska co-founder of ChallengeRocket.com, a global platform specializing in use of AI in automated recruitment in IT says: “Artificial Intelligence will be a part of our lives in a hopefully not so distant future, so it’s best that we embrace it and work extensively on its development sooner than later. Today every major player tries their best at implementing AI into their products, and its uses vary from the best camera settings in your smartphone to showing you weather forecast right when you’re leaving your home. The world has come very close together in the last decade, but speaking every major language on the planet is not something people have time or will for.”
With AI this is yet another wall becoming easier to jump over. No matter the application, it is becoming clearer and clearer that having a virtual assistant somewhere on our body is the future.
