When devices like the Waverly Labs Ambassador Interpreter and Pocketalk Plus Voice Translator hit the scene, the world took some of its biggest steps to date toward universal translation technology, all thanks to gadgets that could listen to two people talking and translate the audio in real time, both ways. Those products emerged just four years ago, and the world of real-time language translation has made incredible strides since. Already, we can look back at devices like these as quaint and useful but limited. In the case of the Pocketalk, the handheld gizmo was good for only two years--after that, you had to buy a new SIM card for 50 each year. You can thank advancements in artificial intelligence for the push forward: Real-time language translation has been a major proving ground for the technology, and I was able to witness how far we've come by testing the latest in real-time translation hardware, the Vasco Translator E1.