The Babel Fish is now a reality

For those of you who haven’t read Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, shame on you!

For those who have you’ll be familiar with the concept of the Babel Fish. A small yellow leech like animal that lived in your ear and fed on brainwave energy. It picked up signals from all around it and excreted intelligible signals into the audio nerve of its host. In practical terms it was a universal translator. In the books the bizarrely improbable coincidence that something so incredibly useful could have evolved purely by chance was the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

Now today we get the news that Apple is set to extend its real-time language translation feature for the AirPods to users in EU. Currently the feature works for English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. It requires a phone that supports Apple intelligence and Air Pods 2 or later. If you have this 2 users speaking to each other in their native tongue in any of the above languages with someone who speaks one of the other supported languages will hear the conversation in their native tongue.  If someone is not using AirPods, they can access a real-time transcript on their screen instead.

Its not quite the Babel Fish but it is frightening how fast technology moves. What started as a joke about God and evolution in 1979 is a reality today. You have to wonder what Adams would have made of it.

Adams was a brilliant writer he predicted many things, such as computers being controlled by voice, touch and gesture. Some fans argue the smartphone is in many ways a version of the Guide. It’s a small handheld device that tells you everything you need or want to know. He also came up with 3 rules describing our reaction to technology, they are as follows

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

There is a certain undeniable logic to these rules!