Over the last year or so, a few companies unveiled pocket-sized, AI-driven voice translator gadgets and apps that can translate spoken language in real time with impressive accuracy even for less-common languages. If these tools continue to improve and become affordable, they could dramatically change travel, work, and cross-cultural communication: imagine chatting with someone in their native language without either of you knowing each other’s tongue. But there are still big challenges like translation accuracy in noisy environments, dialects, slang, and cultural nuance are tough to nail, and reliance on translation tech could weaken learning foreign languages over time. But would we still even need to spend time learning a foreign language with tech like this if it gets to that point?
