Overcoming language barrier as a traveller with a real life 'Babel fish'?steemCreated with Sketch.

in #travel7 years ago

In the book "The Hitchhikers guide to the the Galaxy​ by Douglas Adams", there's a babelfish that you can insert into your ear which will enable you to understand any language there is, how cool is that?

Even though babelfish is a work of fiction, this company Waverly labs made their own version. It works this way, you wear one earpiece and your listener wears the other(hygiene issue here lol). As you speak, the app will pick your language and translate to the other person's language with a siri-like voice in their ears and vice-versa.
The company didn't say how many languages it supports at present as it is still under development but you can pre-order at around $129 - $179.

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photo source: Mashable.com

As a traveller, language barrier is definitely not a deterrent to not travel the world , but it would be very satisfying to be able to understand what the people you're going to meet are saying or want to say to you apart from the usual greetings people learn when they visit a country that has a language that differs from theirs. Like this guy below, he owns a tugboat and he happily helped us crossover a river with our dirt bikes for free, he probably have never seen a black person before (I don't know, maybe,he lives in a pretty remote place though and he looked happy and surprised seeing me) and he wanted to say much but language barrier tsk! tsk!! Instead we took a lot of pictures together, shook hands and I told him "thanks" in his native language, there's where babelfish or waverly lab's device comes in handy.

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Nice post. SpeechTechnology is a great thing. I wrote a few books about that.

Got my upvote!

Thanks, I'm very interested in Speech technology and I'd love to read your books.