... two-way conversations between individual consumers and advertisers via realtime translation of multilingual online ads.
Powell, who graduated from Oxford University less than two years ago, has spent his spare time coupling Vuzix video eyewear with a Raspberry Pi miniature computer plus an iPhone and iPad to enable a person speaking one language to converse in realtime with another who speaks a different language. Although there are marginal delays between translations, provided by Microsoft’s Bing, these are said to be "tolerable".
The demonstration of Powell's glasses posted on his website is pretty impressive, as you can see in this video posted to YouTube.
It shows the translations as captions within a few seconds after the other person speaks. Now, some of the translations aren’t exactly fluid or coherent, but that doesn’t have to do with this technology but the inaccuracies of Bing Translator.
The amazing thing about this setup is how this relatively simple prototype accomplishes such rapid speech recognition and translation at close to a conversational pace. Based on this video, it’s quite easy to imagine a very streamlined translator being incorporated into something like Google Glass and could make the device essential for international business people and tourists.
Read the original unabridged article here.