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The Pilot works through a smart phone app that toggles between languages and uploads them to the earpiece when in use. The earpiece uses noise cancelling microphones to filter out ambient noise from the conversation. The conversation is picked up by a wearer's smart phone, which performs the translation and uses Bluetooth to wirelessly transmit it to the earpiece.
Credit: Waverly LabsHow well the Pilot can handle multi-lingual conversations in real time is unclear, but Indiegogo backers are enthusiastic
As crowdfunding campaigns go, you can't do much better than New York-based Waverly Labs, which last week introduced a wireless earbud that acts as a real-time language translator between two people.
Just five days into the campaign, the Pilot smart earpiece has garnered nearly $1.9 million through more than 8,300 backers on Indiegogo; that's 2,479% more than Waverly Labs' 30-day goal.
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Considering the potential of the technology, it's not surprising the Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign has gone so well.
The Pilot earpiece uses speech recognition and machine translation to enable wearers to speak different languages but still clearly understand each other.
"Simply put, when one person speaks, the other hears it in their language," Waverly Labs states on its Indiegogo campaign page.
Whether that claim can be believed is another thing. In a recent article in Forbes.com, Waverly Labs founder and CEO Andrew Ochoa appeared to backtrack a bit on some of the Indiegogo campaign's claims of real-time conversation translation.
"We don't want to make any promises or references that this is incredibly real-time or that we could give you an earpiece and drop you off in the middle of Tokyo. That is not what we're trying to convey at all," Ochoa said.
Ochoa went on to explain that the Pilot's translation "lags much more than Skypes' latest translation engine does."
The Pilot earbud
Ochoa's online resume is thin. On his Linked-In profile, there is no academic or professional background listed. He has a mere 238 followers of his Twitter profile, and again there is little background information included.
The technology that enables the Pilot is "hybrid," Ochoa told Forbes, explaining that some of it was created by Waverly Labs' six-person development team, and the rest of it was licensed software.
Ochoa did not immediately respond to a request for comment from LACHER INFORMATIC.