With their permission?

Why do you need someone’s permission to translate them?

Ok, so this concept is cool, but has a few problems...

1. Privacy, this is far too complex to run on the headphones themselves, so the system will need to connect to a server to do the heavy lifting, what happens to the data once it used? For legal purposes I suspect it will need to be saved, meaning that any thing recorded could be analyzed or monitored.
2. Trust, AI models have rules in place to make them act in specific ways, the owner of the AI system used could tweak it to change what spoken or how it is said, this could push political agendas in everyday conversations.
3. Reduced lingual skills, an AI like this would reduce the incentive to learn another language, reducing people's international direct communications, increasing dependancy on the AI service, further reducing our lingual skills.

This is scary...

I hate AI as much as the next lemming, but nobody is going to tell me a babble fish for real isn't cool AF.

Anyone who likes this idea might also be interested in checking out RTranslator, an open source, on-device app, which has some similar functionality. You can connect two Bluetooth devices using this app to communicate between two people in different languages.

It can't translate multiple speakera simultaneously or clone voices, but it's very useful for traveling or communicating with friends and family in multiple languages. Especially since it does not need any connection, it comes in handy on the road when you might not have a reliable connection.

This comment should be deleted soon

To clone their voice, and to send the audio to some unknown server

It's not sending the audio to an unknown server. It's all local.
From the article:

The system then translates the speech and maintains the expressive qualities and volume of each speaker’s voice while running on a device, such mobile devices with an Apple M2 chip like laptops and Apple Vision Pro. (The team avoided using cloud computing because of the privacy concerns with voice cloning.)

Except, unlike the real babble fish that feed on our thought waves, this one feeds on our environment and our planet's future.

That looks pretty cool!

I need this for the nail salon. When is it hitting stores and for how much? (I didn't see any mention of cost/availability in the article.)

Next time try reading the article first before you comment.

Dude... RTFA

This is an utterly idiotic comment, I'll break it down into bulletpoints to make it earier to understand.

1. The comment assumes that I didn't read the article, this is semi-wrong, I skimmed it, and found nothing of what I wrote in the article.
2. The comment provides ZERO additional information, it is pure snark, and does nothing to inform me about what I missed.
3. The comment assumes that everyone else also reads the article, this is not the case.
4. The comment forgets the advantage of summarizing for others, if my points was found in the article, it is a good thing to summarize them in a more accessible way.

With these point in mind I believe you can make an effort to make a better comment next time.

I hope you dont play video games or stream HD video, given that they use more electricity for less social benefit than this would.

Monolingual people should be reminded that machine translation is still for rather basic conversation.

Until they manage to autogenerate even correct English subs on YouTube on English speaking videos, theres really not much trust I will have in it.

So yeah, cool function, definitely helpful, but machine translation isn't dependable if you need to accurate with your language.

I have a few problems with this episode, but also it's one of my favourites, because it's trying to actually process the problems tech like that would have, languages is sometimes incredibly contextual.

For one AI is shit with idioms.

For things like the UN, you just must have an actual person — who's proficient at a native-level — translating.

Though babble fish is a funny term, Douglas Adams named the creature "Babel fish", after the biblical story of the tower of Babel.