During The Developers’ Event, Google Announced Its Return To The Failed Augmented Reality Project By Showing A Video Of The Live Translator Glasses. 

How much can we hope to fulfill Google’s promises this time?

I do not know if you watched Google I / O this year or read the summary of the whole event. The event, which returned to the Mountain View stage two years after the epidemic began, was more productive and exciting than previous years. Along with software news and new search capabilities, from Scene Exploration to intelligent skin color recognition, a large portion of the products were introduced—hardware and user-centric, including Pixel 6a, Pixel Watch, and Pixel Tablet.

But at the end of the ceremony, Google came up with another surprise that was the most ambitious and, in my opinion, the most futuristic and exciting product Google introduced at the event; Translator glasses!

In a short video, Google unveiled augmented reality glasses that have only one feature: to show the translation of people’s words right in the field of view of the user who has glasses. In this emotional video, at the bottom of which was the phrase “simulated show,” we saw a mother and child who were able to understand each other for the first time.

We also saw a person speaking sign language and augmented his professional translation into English for someone with Google glasses reality and vivid. Google’s product manager described the ability to translate live glasses as “subtitles for the world” and briefly immersed us in the idea of ​​a more beautiful future than we usually expect.

But how practical is this idea, and how far are we from this future? So much so that it may not live on or be buried under a pile of abandoned Google projects?

Google has decided to equip these glasses with only one feature, which has been improving for 16 years, which is a brilliant decision and gives us a little hope for its future. However, while Google Translate is a handy and astonishing tool that has come to our aid in an emergency, it has also made many embarrassing translation mistakes.

The Google Translate translation may trust as far as greetings and addresses are concerned. Still, there is no way to ensure that classic stories or their proverbs and complex sentences are translated correctly from non-European languages.

Google describes translator glasses as subtitles for the world

In 2017, when Google was promoting the first generation of Pixel Buds, it maneuvered a lot on its live translation capability. Of course, people who have had the experience of using these headphones described its ability to translate live as a decent idea, but with unfortunate implementation.

The ability of these headphones to translate people’s conversations was such that you felt like a five-year-old child was talking to you, and this experience was different from what Google showed at the time in the PixelBods promotional video, earth to sky.

Google’s translation problems and challenges aside, the company has promised that translation will be done in augmented reality glasses; Another area that Google has been dealing with since 2012 and has not yet been able to make even 10% of what it showed in the Google Glass concept video it showed at the time.

In this video, Google makes some fantastic and ambitious promises; Watch and interact with all smartphone applications such as reminders, messages, clocks and weather reports, instant metro status reports, and routing and video calling flashes, and take photos and upload them to social media, all right in front of the user’s eyes. It is done with the help of Google Glass. But the project did not go anywhere and became a complete failure for Google, so it did not find out for several years.

Of course, Google Translate’s glasses are more focused than the failed Glass project, and it’s only going to do one thing, which makes the lousy company’s promise a little more credible.

Google showed us glasses that were only supposed to display translated text, not all the work of a smartphone at once. But how possible is it to do the same thing, mainly when Google has not yet explained the mechanism of these glasses?

The truth is that making augmented reality glasses is not an easy task at all. If you are in an environment where the light level is only a little high, you can not read the texts easily. Even reading subtitles on a TV screen becomes very challenging when exposed to direct sunlight; What is more, we want to have this experience stuck on a screen when we are talking to someone whose language we do not understand.

Admittedly, technology is advancing rapidly, and Google may be able to meet the current challenges in a few years. But the fact remains that Google Translate has not developed enough to translate conversations accurately; How can one expect fluent translations in the company’s augmented reality glasses?

Of course, just as we use more transparent, more straightforward voice commands when talking to Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant to make them intelligible to machine intelligence, we may use more concise, more unambiguous sentences when using translation tools.

But in the simplest case, the performance of Google Translate was not as expected. For example, a Korean speaker said that “welcome” was used in the Google I / O countdown video, not operated by any Korean language.

It is just a common mistake; A more significant and unforgivable mistake was made when Google talked about adding 24 new languages ​​to Translate!

On the screen behind Google, CEO Sundar Pichai typed the names of the languages ​​written in the Arabic alphabet separately and inversely, and entirely incomprehensibly. An Arabic-speaking Twitter user even taunted Google, pointing to Pichai, saying, “Small, independent startups like Google do not have enough funds to hire someone as literate as an elementary school student.”

Honestly, we do not expect a 100% flawless experience from Google products; But for a company that is desperately trying to convince us that there is nothing left to do with live translation into augmented reality glasses, the occurrence of such embarrassing mistakes calls into question the credibility of Google’s claim.

Google is trying to solve an extremely complex problem.

Words are easy to translate, grammar difficult to understand, But language and conversation are much more complex than words and grammar. For example, multilingual people sometimes use words from another language when speaking one language. Do you think Google Translator Glasses can translate this conversation model? The new story becomes more complicated regarding half-sentences, ambiguities, sayings, and vague references.

Of course, Google is not alone in competing with augmented reality glasses. Meta has already spent billions of dollars developing AR glasses. The number of employees in its hardware and software division has grown to about 18,000, which cost the company more than $ 10 billion last year alone.

The meta roadmap for these glasses, which looks more ambitious than Google Translator glasses, is 2024 to 2026. Still, it is improbable that we will see technology that can put someone in front of us in the form of a hologram to play chess together in a few years.

With all that said, Google’s app for translator glasses is quite admirable. I look forward to the day when everyone, like the mother and child of Google Video, can understand each other without any problems.

But there is still a long way to go before that day and augmented reality glasses become widespread. I do not think Google’s initial efforts to offer these glasses as satisfying as the video we watched at the I / O event will be satisfactory.