The InnAIO T10 clips magnetically to the back of your phone, but it needs further development to be worth the money. Magnetic attachment is a killer idea. App feature-loaded but requires some effort to learn. App UI is confusing, with some features less useful than others. Subscription required after just six months.

Mobile translation apps have improved substantially in recent years--with a little help on speech recognition from AI. Most apps can now keep up with real-time conversations, if your phone has a strong enough internet connection (so the audio can be processed and converted in the cloud). It means if you're trying to hold a conversation with someone in a language you don't know, you no longer need to spend time typing out words and phrases, or trying to figure out spellings and pronunciations. Instead, simply place your phone between you and the other person, and start chatting. There are several apps that can do this for you, but here we'll focus on the free translation apps on your Pixel phone, Galaxy phone, or iPhone.

Based on a number of new features being rolled up within new "Release Preview" updates for Windows 11, Microsoft appears to be readying a push for AI-powered enhancements in the coming weeks. Although Microsoft typically reserves major feature releases for the fall, April 2025 is a key month for the software giant because it marks the 50th anniversary of the company's founding. With two preview releases of Windows 11, Microsoft has tipped off what features your PC will be receiving soon--most likely in April. If you do, note that Microsoft isn't releasing all of these features in one fell swoop. Some of them will be released "normally" while others are rolled out in a "gradual" cadence.

Meta is chugging along on their Universal Speech Translator, which hopes to train an artificial intelligence to translate hundreds of languages in real time. Today, the tech giant claims to have generated the first artificial intelligence to translate Hokkien, which is a language primarily spoken and not written. Hokkien is a language that is spoken by approximately 49 million people in countries like China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Phillippines. Typically, training an AI to understand human speech--and in Meta's case, translation--researchers will feed the computer a large dataset of written transcripts. But Meta says that Hokkien is once of nearly 3,500 languages that are primarily spoken, meaning Hokkien does not have a large enough dataset to train the artificial intelligence since the language does not have a unified writing system.

That's what the doll in Squid Game says. But how would you know! You got subtitles on your plate. Shows like Squid Game and Money Heist topping Netflix charts opened up a whole new genre of drama and entertainment for the audience to explore with different language content. People locked inside the doors during the pandemic brought the world closer together in its unique ways.

Zoom announced today it plans to acquire Karlsruhe Information Technology, a German startup that specializes in machine learning-based real-time translation. Also known as Kites, the company is made up of about a dozen researchers with ties to the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Zoom didn't share the financial terms of the deal, but did disclose that the startup will help it bring machine translation features to its platform. Moving forward, Zoom says it may also establish a research and development center in Germany. "We are continuously looking for new ways to deliver happiness to our users and improve meeting productivity, and [machine translation] solutions will be key in enhancing our platform for Zoom customers across the globe," said Velchamy Sankarlingam, president of product and engineering at Zoom.

Google speaks 106 languages--or at least can understand queries in written form if not also oral form. When I watch someone interacting verbally with Google Assistant in languages other than English (my native tongue), I realize Google's language ability vastly exceeds my own. I have a modest ability to speak and understand German. I know a few phrases in Russian and French. But it suddenly strikes me that Google is usefully dealing with over 100 languages in written and oral form.

According to its creator, 63 per cent of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to global markets because of language barriers. "Over 52 native languages in Africa have undergone language death and have no native speakers," said Emmanuel Gabriel, founder of Germany-based OpenBinacle, the creator of OBTranslate, which was launched this month. "In the next five years, we hope to acquire thousands or millions of users to take up translation tasks on OBTranslate." The innovation resulted from an earlier messaging app that was built in 2017 to allow interaction in real-time translation of 26 African languages, but led to inaccurate outputs, Gabriel admitted. "We were very frustrated about the messaging app, and as a result we didn't want to come into the market with a bad product," added Gabriel.

Google's aptly named AI helper, Google Assistant, is poised to have a great year in 2019. Not only will the digital assistant be spreading to numerous devices old and new, but there are a host of new features coming, too, several of which were shown off at CES 2019 last week. This list of upcoming Google Assistant updates is long, and it can be overwhelming trying to parse out all the different announcements and keep track of when these new features will finally be available. To help, we've curated a rundown detailing the best and most important updates coming for Google Assistant in the next few months, including what devices these new features have been announced for, their expected release dates, and how to enable them (when available). By far, the most hyped new Assistant feature at CES was the Interpreter Mode.

To date, using Google's real-time translations has officially required a set of Pixel Buds. But what if you'd rather not use the official audio gear? You might not have to. Droid Life has noticed that Google quietly changed a support page to state that real-time translation is available for "all Assistant-optimized headphones and Android phones," not just Pixel Buds and Pixel phones as the page said as recently as October 11th. Users have already verified that this works on a basic level -- you can use the Pixel 3's USB-C headphones to translate on a non-Pixel phone.