Google’s new headphones can translate 40 languages on the fly – here’s how

Google’s new Pixel Buds are wireless headphones that can reportedly translate 40 languages almost in real time.

Part of a line of new products announced Oct. 4, the earbuds pair up with Google’s new Pixel 2 handset and tap into Google Assistant, the company’s voice-activated product powered by artificial intelligence.

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Now all you have to do when in Rome, is hold down on your right earbud and say, “help me speak Italian,” Adam Champy, Google’s product manager for the headphones, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

But will your robotic translation actually get you a plate of delicious fettuccine – or create more confusion than your own butchered Italian would have?

Google Translate isn’t exactly known for flawless renderings. As many high-schoolers quickly found out, it wasn’t even good enough to hack one’s way through homework.

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But if you try the service now, you might be surprised.

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As more and more users are discovering, Google Translate has gotten a lot better over the past year.

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That’s because Google has been swapping its old translation algorithm for something called neural machine translation, which can translate entire sentences instead of slicing up the text and trying to match words or phrases to a big dictionary.

The new technology is much faster at turning one language into another. But it is also able to learn and improve, which is why Google’s translations have become considerably more accurate and reliable.

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“With this update, Google Translate is improving more in a single leap than we’ve seen in the last 10 years combined,” Google Translate product lead Barak Turovsky wrote last November, when the company rolled out its revamped service for French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish.

Here’s what the difference looks like, according to Google:

View image in full screen

To be sure, even the new Google Translate doesn’t get it 100 per cent right all the time. When this reporter, who is a native Italian speaker, plugged in a few Italian sentences, Google did miss a few nuances.

Still, the Pixel Buds should be good enough for ordering food or getting street directions to the Colosseum – just mind the roaming charges.