We’ve been covering Waverly Labs for a few years now, primarily focused on the company’s wearable language translators. Today at CES, the Brookyln-based hardware startup unveiled a new form factor for its tech — designed for real-world interactions, and removing the need to share in-ear devices (something that seems like a net positive when we’re all so focused on germs).
Subtitles is comprised of a double-sided touchscreen display that sits atop a counter or desk in places like restaurants, retail stores, banks, airports, hotels and the like. A user chooses their language, speaks, and the translation appears on the opposite display “in near real-time.”
In addition to language translation, it could also prove a useful tool for the hearing impaired — almost like in-person closed captioning. As the name implies, the company compares the experience to watching a translated film.
The system is built on Waverly’s tech, which translates 20 languages and 42 dialects, including: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, Greek, Russian, Hindi, Turkish, Polish, Chinese Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hebrew, Thai, Vietnamese and Dutch. It’s currently being shown off at CES and is set to arrive at some point in Q2. No pricing has been announced.
Waverly also used the show to introduce a new version of its Amasaddor Interpreter over-ear translator. Says Waverly:
It uses an advanced far-field microphone array combined with speech recognition neural networks to capture speech with astounding levels of clarity. It then seamlessly processes speech with cloud-based machine translation engines to deliver fast, fluid, and highly accurate translations.
That one is available now for $179.
