John told me that my efforts to learn Swedish online with Duolingo help to improve Google Translate and similar translation services, which purchase the history of users’ mistakes in order to refine their translation algorithms. I think Google Translate has fewer howlers lately. Maybe I helped.
Now along comes a product that claims to translate as you converse with a speaker of another language. Spenser Mestel has the story at the Atlantic.
“Last week, New York City-based Waverly Labs announced its recent invention, Pilot, a set of two ear buds that costs $299. Scheduled to be released by spring of 2017, the device purports to offer near-simultaneous translation for four languages.
“Inspired ‘when he met a French girl,’ Andrew Ochoa, the company’s founder, says that Pilot promises ‘a life untethered, free of language barriers.’ …
“Despite how quickly machine translation has progressed in the last few decades, language is a data set that’s far more complex than it seems, so no matter how quickly translation technology evolves, the stochastic messiness of speech will always outpace it. …
“In 1949, the scientist Warren Weaver proposed an alternative to rule-based translation called statistical machine translation (SMT). Instead of attacking language one minutia at a time, Weaver suggested a two-pronged approach: First, the computer would mine millions of documents looking for statistically significant linguistic patterns, thereby discovering the grammar, syntax, and morphology rules for itself. At the same time, the program would create a model to predict how certain phrases are translated and where in the sentence they should appear. …
“Waverly Labs hasn’t yet released the details of its software, but it likely works in the same fundamental way as Google Translate, which uses these rules and the predictive model to give the most statistically likely translation, the one that best mirrors the patterns it already found. …
“Even if it lags and stutters, Waverly Labs’s Pilot … could allow for more substantive engagement with the world.” More here.
Photo: Waverly Labs
The Pilot in-ear translators from Waverly Labs 
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
Yes, but is Swedish one of the four languages?!
LOL. I better find out. The 4-year-old was going to help me learn, but he likes to make up words to fool me.