[Art]

...is no more! Thanks in part to this innovative, wearable device. It is definitely a game changer.

http://www.chonday.com/Videos/eartranslfghy4/

[kei10]

I took a little research on Waverly Labs, which is responsible for this little "A World Without Language Barriers. Be the first to experience a new kind of wearable technology", and the campaign is about to hit indiegogo, a crowd funding site.

It appears that there are quite a lot of doubts lurking around. The idea itself sounds like scam due to various reasonable basis.

One of the doubt is the earbud itself, the next follow up is today's technological capability of translation. It's not evolutionary, and most crowdfund projects become hideous.

[Art]

I would have thought the earbud would be a receiver of a bluetooth nature so that it could transmit & receive the speech to a "on person" device much like the smart phones are.

Agreed that a lot of these crowd sourcing events end up being nothing more than an unfortunate vehicle for some shysters to collect a lot of well-intentioned money. The promised product all to often ends up being vaporware!

The bad hurts the good.

[Freddy]

This idea has been around for a while. Akin to Douglas Adams' Babel Fish Translator.

The technology exists to record and recognise words - Voice recognition.

The technology exists to translate one language to another - Google Translate (though we could argue about how good that is).

The technology exists to make text into audio - TTS.

This guy put it in a sandwich and added some mayonnaise.