Yesterday's science fiction is today's invention. Babel Fish, the "oddest thing in the universe", is a species of fish featured in Douglas Adam's magnum opus, The Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy. The fish, worn as an earpiece, translates all the languages that ever existed instantly. Babel Fish is no longer the stuff of dreams: Thanks to advances in AI, especially in the NLP domain, many tech giants are in the process of building a universal translator. To that end, Universal Speech Translator was a dominant theme in the Meta's Inside the Lab event on February 23.

Noise, Alex Waibel tells me, is one of the major challenges that artificial speech translation has to meet. A device may be able to recognise speech in a laboratory, or a meeting room, but will struggle to cope with the kind of background noise I can hear surrounding Professor Waibel as he speaks to me from Kyoto station. I'm struggling to follow him in English, on a scratchy line that reminds me we are nearly 10,000km apart – and that distance is still an obstacle to communication even if you're speaking the same language. We haven't reached the future yet. If we had, Waibel would have been able to speak in his native German and I would have been able to hear his words in English.

Would-be travelers of the galaxy, rejoice: The Chinese tech giant Baidu has invented a translation system that brings us one step closer to a software Babel fish. For those unfamiliar with the Douglas Adams masterworks of science fiction, let me explain. The Babel fish is a slithery fictional creature that takes up residence in the ear canal of humans, tapping into their neural systems to provide instant translation of any language they hear. In the real world, until now, we've had to make do with human and software interpreters that do their best to keep up. But the new AI-powered tool from Baidu Research, called STACL, could speed things up considerably.

The MIT Technology Review has released a list of technologies it believes will make the most impact over the next 12 months, including smarter cities, genetic fortune telling and "babel fish" earphones.

SAN FRANCISCO – Google on Wednesday introduced new Pixel ear buds that the company says are capable of real-time translation of conversations in different languages. A demonstration given as Google unveiled a host of new products infused with its digital Assistant smarts got people playfully referring to Pixel Buds as an internet-Age version of the alien "Babel Fish" depicted in famed science fiction work "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." In the literature, inserting a Babel Fish in an ear enabled a person to understand anything spoken in any language. Pixel Buds, synced to freshly introduced second-generation Pixel smartphones, promise real-time translations of conversations involving any of 40 languages. However, on Android phones, the Google Assistant currently is available in only five languages: English, French, German, Japanese and Portuguese.

Google's Pixel 2 event in San Francisco on Wednesday had a lot of stuff to show off and most of it was more of the same: the next iteration of the flagship smartphone, new Home speakers and various ways of entwining them more deeply into your smart home, a new laptop that's basically a Yoga running ChromeOS and a body camera that I'm sure we've seen somewhere before. We saw stuff like this last time and are sure to see more of it again at next year's event. But tucked into the tail end of the presentation, Google quietly revealed that it had changed the world with a pair of wireless headphones. Not to be outdone by Apple's Air Pods and their wirelessly-charging TicTac storage case, Google packed its headphones with the power to translate between 40 languages, literally in real-time. The company has finally done what science fiction and countless Kickstarters have been promising us, but failing to deliver on, for years.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, writer Douglas Adams describes a "small, yellow, leech-like creature" called the Babel fish which "feeds on brain-wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain, the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language". Botanists have not discovered anything like the Babel fish, but the science fiction of universal translation is rapidly becoming reality thanks to technological advances. Most exciting for Hitchhiker fans is the Pilot earbud, backed by $3.5 million in crowdfunding raised by a startup called Waverly Labs. The company's chief executive Andrew Ochoa says: "We were really inspired with wearable technology and began working on the idea of a smart earpiece that could solve a global challenge. We were a small team back then, but we all came from different backgrounds and spoke different languages, and that's how we came up with the idea."

A renewed international effort is gearing up to design computers and software that smash language barriers and create a borderless global marketplace. A woman sits at a desk in Manhattan, talking to herself in French. The phrases she balances on each breath are musical to American ears. She has postcards of Montreal tacked up on the walls of her cubicle – pastel-painted houses in the snow – so as she sculpts the contours of each syllable, she can remind herself of the place where the sounds she's making are heard every day in the street. Her name is Guylaine Laperrière, and she came to New York City more than a decade ago to study musical theater. One day, a friend asked her if she wanted to make a little cash dubbing a French voice-over for a promotional short about insurance. She took the job, and was surprised how much she enjoyed bringing ideas from one language home into another. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links.

Language barriers are starting to crumble. This month Japan's dominant mobile phone operator, NTT DoCoMo, introduced the world's first app for real-time voice translation. When a user with a DoCoMo smartphone places a call through the app, he speaks in Japanese and his words are promptly translated into English, Mandarin, or Korean. To complete the conversational circuit, the other person's words are translated from any of those languages back into Japanese. With this debut we've taken one step closer to building a mechanical Babel fish, the extraordinarily useful creature imagined by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

In today's data-rich world, companies, governments and individuals want to analyze anything and everything they can get their hands on – and the World Wide Web has loads of information. At present, the most easily indexed material from the web is text. But as much as 89 to 96 percent of the content on the internet is actually something else – images, video, audio, in all thousands of different kinds of nontextual data types. A map showing hotbeds of dark web activity related to illegal products. Tor - short for The Onion Router - is a seething matrix of encrypted websites that allows users to surf beneath the everyday internet with complete anonymity. It uses numerous layers of security and encryption to render users anonymous online.