Can Smart Earbuds Instantly Translate Foreign Speech?

STEPPING OFF THE PLANE in Russia for the first time in 2013, I collided with a wall of blunt language and was intrigued beyond repair. Five years, countless classes and ten visits to Moscow later, I still claim a distinctly below-average capacity for the Russian tongue and its dense, foreboding components. To fill these gaps ahead of my next adventure abroad, I turned to technology. Late last year, Brooklyn's Waverly Labs released the Pilot ($299, waverlylabs.com), These eavesdropping devices use a cloud-based machine learning technology to pipe dozens of different languages into your brain in your mother tongue.