At this time of year, the world's newest and most interesting electronics gather in Las Vegas for CES (International Consumer Electronics Show), one of the world's largest digital shows.
As in previous years, this time we also walked around
The CES was also quite interesting, and Tony found a lot to share.
One of them is about languageAs we all know, due to the language barrier, people use English in international communicationLingua francaBut at CES, there is a place where everyone is speaking their "hometown dialect".
What's even more amazing is that there is no communication barrier at all, and everyone chats happily.
Shen Zhijun comes
May I ask where you guys are from?
is this the first time you h**e been here ”？
Is this your first time here?
This kind of excitement, we must go and make up for it.
When I squeezed in, I realized that this was not a time-space kettle!
I have been following them since 2017, it is a domestic AI company that mainly focuses on simultaneous interpretation equipment, and in order to pursue the translation experience, their headphones do not even support listening**.
In line with the principle of coming and coming, everyone is Chinese, then it is easy to talk, Tony simply cheekily went up, while experiencing, chatting with their staff.
This time, Timekettle brought their latest product, the X1 simultaneous interpreter, an AI translation product, to CES.
The aforementioned scenario where everyone chats in "hometown dialect" is achieved through x1.
This product includes 2 headphones and 1 terminal simultaneous interpreter, and the design is quite clever, and the headphones can be stored in the translator.
Translation devices are common enough on the market, why did the x1 attract so many onlookers?
Out of curiosity, I also got my hands on the x1's two-player dialogue feature.
With the blessing of this function, two earphones can achieve simultaneous interpretation for two people, and one person can communicate across languages with one earphone, covering almost all cross-language communication scenarios.
Supporting 40 languages and 93 accents, with an average accuracy rate of up to 95%, Tony's two colleagues got a little more difficult and tested the translation between Japanese and Korean, and the effect was also very good.
Even more subtle is the interactive experience.
In the past, when I traveled to South Korea, when I needed to ask for directions, I had to open the translation software ** typing, and handed the phone over when I caught a stranger, he took a look, took the phone, and it was **typing, and then handed it to me after typing,It's like a stuttering "turn-based" game.
But now, you can put on your headphones and talk in your native language.
When you say something to me, you don't feel the existence of cross-language at all, it's like a daily conversation.
Bilingual translation between Chinese and English.
In fact, since transportation and the Internet have connected the earth into a village, cross-language communication has gradually become a rigid need, and now there are various translation software and hardware on the market, and there are enough language translation solutions.
Why not follow the proven solutions on the market and explore a completely new product form yourself?
The staff at Timekettle told me that their company wanted to do things with an end-game mindset when it was founded.
"In the case of full imagination, the final human translation product should be one in which all languages can communicate as naturally as their mother tongue, and the existence of this product is almost imperceptible."
At that time, the traditional solution on the market: manual simultaneous interpretation, was expensive and difficult to popularize, and it was impossible to solve the situation of multilingual communication, so you could not let everyone find a few translators to accompany you.
The translation machine, in addition to the "turn-based" will bring a sense of discontinuity, most of the time it is in human-computer interaction, and the presence of the device is very strong, even more than human.
From the perspective of cross-language communication, these solutions are not optimal, nor will they be the ultimate cross-language solutions for human beings.
Therefore, as early as 2017, Timekettle launched the world's first simultaneous interpretation headset WT2 Plus based on the technical conditions at that time, and determined a new cross-language communication product form.
In the words of Tian Li, the founder of the Timekettle"We don't want to do too many homogeneous products, but hope to create new products that allow users to have more choices. Solving practical problems is something we are very proud of, and only by solving problems can we be recognized by the market. ”
The results obtained by this product are also quite exciting.
First, it was really sold.
In 2018, it received millions of angel round financing, officially mass production, and in 2021, it launched its core product W3 two-way simultaneous interpretation headset again, which won the first place in the hot sales list of Amazon's translation headset category, and went abroad and was successfully sold to more than 100 countries, and now has more than 300,000 users worldwide.
Timekettle W3 translation headphones.
There are also many awards, such as the CES 2024 Innovation Award, iF Design Award, and the Japan Good Design Award, and various international awards.
In 2022, CIPG conducted a test of mainstream AI translators, and pulled in the mainstream AI translators in China, allowing 216 translators who had obtained CATT Level 2 or above certificates and 223 other translation enthusiasts to participate in the test.
However, the X1 simultaneous interpreter on display at CES is very different from the previous translation headphones.
At the CES scene, you can also see such a scene, a lot of foreigners holding X1s and touching them.
With a single touch, two x1 simultaneous interpreters can freely form a translation subnet
Two will do, three or five
After multiple devices are paired by bump and touch to form a translation network, the x1 can accommodate up to 20 people 5 languages at the same time, allowing multiple people to speak at the same time, and the interpretation will be broadcast to the participants' headsets in multiple directions in parallel.
This is also the only product in the world that can do 20 people and 5 languages synchronous communication.
The staff of the Timekettle told me that standing on the endgame mind,"A product that communicates across languages should support any language, and when we hear or need to communicate, we only need to open our mouths to speak, so it should support the translation of all languages in the world, not just two languages."
In fact, as the earth becomes more and more connected into a "village", many business customers have reported to the time pot that in transnational business meetings, they will encounter multi-Chinese participation, and the equipment for two-way simultaneous interpretation is not enough.
So what to do?Let's connect.
Although on the surface, it seems that it is also used to wear headphones, which is more similar to the shape of the previous translation headphones.
But the X1 itself is a translation device with a screen, a built-in screen, a microphone, and AI translation technology and cloud services.
Think of it as a carry-on, instantaneous, private simultaneous interpretation.
If you have any translation needs on your mobile phone or computer, you only need to pair X1, and X1 can translate for you in real time, which is equivalent to a translation platform that can connect to other devices and provide AI applications.
Multi-directional simultaneous interpretation, on the surface, seems to be only a little stronger than two-way simultaneous interpretation, but in fact...
How do I transmit multiple voices to a terminal in a multi-person dialogue scenario? When multiple people are speaking, crosstalk will cause great interference to the translation output, how to identify the voices of different people? How do I wake up? How do I break a sentence? How do I get rid of the noise?
All in all, every question is quite a headache.
To this end, Timekettle is also continuing to make technological innovations, such as creating the RNNVAD automatic sentence breaking algorithm for vocal recognition, using AI to train equipment to only recognize human voices, so as to break sentences more accurately in noisy environments and make translation more efficient and accurate.
If you think about it carefully, from the very beginning of the IBM 701 computer, Wenquxing dictionary, translation software, handheld translator to translation headset, and even today's simultaneous interpreter X1, in the history of human beings overcoming language barriers, the form of translation products has been constantly iterating, more and more in line with human communication habits, and more and more "de-productization".
And the appearance of X1 makes me feel that the reality seems to be closer to the sci-fi future in "The Wandering Earth" in which Liu Peiqiang communicates with Russians in his native language.
Although I am in the midst of technology every day, there are many moments that make me sigh that technology has made times change rapidly.
More than ten years ago, if you wanted to travel abroad, you had to be able to master a foreign language yourself, rewind back and forth with a backgammon repeater, and recite back and forth.
And now you want to travel abroad, there are countless big factories rushing to translate for you, you slide your phone, type your own question, and wait for the language translation to be generated.
And when your daily cross-language needs have been met, companies like Timekettle also want technological innovation to change the direction of the industry again, so that everything is one step closer to science fiction films: from simple translation to infinite and close to daily communication.
Maybe in a few years, we won't need to learn the language anymore, wear headphones to communicate freely with friends in different languages, and even don't even need to bring a mobile phone, and bring a bracelet or glasses to solve all communication needs
I believe that in the future, not only in tourism or business scenes, but in all the scenarios we can imagine, there will be newer and warmer technological life experiences.