Viral barrier, yes. Language barrier, no.

Is it just me shouting behind my face mask? At any rate, I can’t hear a thing other people are saying behind their muffling masks. So some Japanese robot guide makers switched automation gears to fabricate mask-mounted speakers to amplify and translate whatever lies behind your mask.

How Does It Work?

Their smart mask is designed to fit over a regular face mask and connect to a smartphone or tablet via Bluetooth. It’s supposed to be able to make calls, amplify your voice, transcribe text messages and translate your speech into eight languages.

Donut Robotics envisions the mask to be used at company meetings, companies’ reception desks, grocery store check-out lines and medical examinations at hospitals.

The smart mask isn’t available yet, so only time will tell if it’s useful enough to use, but I do hope to try it out when it becomes available in Japan in the fall.

Full Speed Ahead

I’m always intrigued when new translation technologies come on the market. The gibberish from Google Translate used to be a guaranteed laugh riot, but we are laughing less and less about it these days.

Translation technology is coming in fast and hard at Responsive Translation and in the language services industry as a whole. Of course, there are products with kinks to work out that are still just novelties at this point, but more and more translation technologies are graduating to commercial applications. From pre-translation to automated quality assurance tools, there is a growing number of reasons for translation customers and companies to rejoice.

We’re witnessing a veritable renaissance of technologies that are ready to be adopted and incorporated into ever-more efficient translation service workflows.

So what will they come up with next? I’ll be ready to see if and how it can help us provide our customers with even more momentum.

One Size Does Not Fit All

Responsive Translation has been providing high-stakes translation, interpreting and other foreign-language services for more than 30 years. While we don’t believe in technology for technology’s sake, we do firmly believe in the carefully-selected technologies that allow us to provide higher-quality, more cost-effective services for our clients every day.

For more information about our range of services and our on-demand enterprise solutions, please contact us at 646-847-3309 or [email protected].