Babel Fish Anyone? AI Translation is Making Language Barriers Disappear
Following AI advancements lately, I’ve been amazed by how quickly we’re approaching something that seemed purely science fiction just a few years ago – universal real-time translation.
The Tech is Already Here
The breakthrough moment for me was watching the Lex Fridman interview with Volodymyr Zelenskyy that ElevenLabs translated and dubbed. The original conversation switched between Ukrainian, English and Russian, but ElevenLabs made it so I could watch the entire thing in English. What blew me away wasn’t just the translation quality, it was that they perfectly mimicked both speakers’ actual voices. Zelenskyy sounded like him, just speaking fluent English throughout the entire interview.
This isn’t just a small startup either. ElevenLabs does all kinds of text-to-speech and speech-to-text conversions. Google has also built their own podcast generator engine NotebookLM that will take your text research paper and will generate a seamless podcast style conversation about it. I’ve tried it as well and it is very convincing and natural.
Two Sides of the Same Coin
What is happening is really two complementary technologies advancing at the same time. Text-to-speech is getting really good and the voice synthesizing has become really natural and on the flip side, speech-to-text is also getting incredibly accurate. I’ve tested several tools over the past week and been amazed at how well they handle different languages in real-time with very few mistakes. Soniox for example is remarkably accurate with Estonian (my mother tongue). This is something that would have been impossible just a couple of years ago for such a small language group (around 1 million native speakers). But when you combine those two capabilities – understanding what people say and generating natural speech – you get something powerful.
Hello Universal Translator
This is leading us straight to something Douglas Adams imagined in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel Fish, a small organism that could translate any language seamlessly. Star Trek had the same concept with their Universal Translator, letting alien species communicate effortlessly in their native tongues.
I always found it funny watching Star Trek, how Klingons and Andorians all seemed to speak fluent English. But now I realize the show actually got it right – that’s exactly how it would feel to the users. Everyone speaks their own language, but technology makes it seem like everyone is speaking yours.
The Near Future
We’re heading quickly toward a world where we all have tiny AI-enabled earpieces. We’ll be talking to each other in our native languages. From the outside it might look strange – people speaking different languages but understanding each other perfectly. But for those wearing the devices, it’ll feel completely natural. It’ll be like everyone is speaking directly to you in your mother tongue.
Given what I’ve seen from companies like ElevenLabs and Google, and knowing how competitive this space has become, I’m convinced the major tech companies are already working to build this into our AirPods and similar devices. The technology isn’t science fiction any more – it’s just engineering at this point.
The Babel Fish is almost here. The question isn’t if we’ll have seamless realtime universal translation, but how quickly it becomes as common as having a smartphone in your pocket. It’ll be really exciting to see which company will launch this technology first.
Babel Fish photo credit Anna-Maja Oléhn
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