Baidu’s pocket translator is a ‘Star Trek’ dream come to life

By Luke Dormehl Published March 28, 2018

Chinese search giant Baidu has long been investing in artificial intelligence research, whether it’s hiring away the creator of the Google Brain project, building autonomous cars or creating a recent A.I. which can mimic your voice after listening to it for only a short period of time. At this week’s MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco, Baidu gave a demo of one of its most impressive consumer-facing examples of A.I. to date: A Star Trek-style pocket universal translator that is able to translate spoken sentences from English into Mandarin and back again.

Shown off on stage, the device was used to facilitate a conversation between English speaking senior editor Will Knight and Baidu chief scientist Hua Wu. The device appears to be capable of easily translating questions like “Where can I buy this device?” and “When will machines replace humans?” into Mandarin, and the Mandarin language responses back into English. To do this, it draws on Baidu’s deep-learning neural networks: The same technology which drives Google’s ever-improving machine translation and voice-recognition technology.

The gadget has reportedly been available since December, although right now it can only be leased at travel agencies and airports in China. Its immediate goal is to use its English, Chinese and Japanese translations (more languages will follow in the future) to help people navigate around cities. However, MIT Technology Review claims that other markets are planned for expansion in the future — hopefully meaning that it won’t be too long before we can get our hands on one of these devices.

While a number of mobile devices can carry out impressive machine translation at present, that doesn’t diminish how impressive Baidu’s achievement is. Not only does it underline how successful the company has been at taking on the Silicon Valley tech giants, but its apparently straightforward ease of use absolutely makes this a gadget we would be interested in picking up. Especially if, at some point, Baidu can combine this with its aforementioned voice soundalike technology.

Along with Google’s in-ear translation earbuds, it seems that we’re living in an incredibly exciting time for machine translation.

Topics

Contributor

I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…

Emerging Tech

Revisiting the rise of A.I.: How far has artificial intelligence come since 2010?

christie's auction house obvious art ai

2010 doesn’t seem all that long ago. Facebook was already a giant, time-consuming leviathan; smartphones and the iPad were a daily part of people’s lives; The Walking Dead was a big hit on televisions across America; and the most talked-about popular musical artists were the likes of Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber. So pretty much like life as we enter 2020, then? Perhaps in some ways.

One place that things most definitely have moved on in leaps and bounds, however, is on the artificial intelligence front. Over the past decade, A.I. has made some huge advances, both technically and in the public consciousness, that mark this out as one of the most important ten year stretches in the field’s history. What have been the biggest advances? Funny you should ask; I’ve just written a list on exactly that topic.

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.