Hands On With the Langogo Genesis, a Translating Babelfish That Fits I
I love traveling overseas, but no matter how often I do it, I still dread those moments where I’m trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t understand English or the tiny bits of a couple of other languages I try as a last resort. So I was quite enthusiastic about taking Langogo’s Genesis pocket translator ($299) along on a recent multi-country trip.
The Genesis also has a mode where it will simply translate whatever it hears. This is useful if you want to carry on a conversation and have multiple people speaking. It has a reasonably good built-in microphone that works with a few people around a small table. For a conference room setting, it’d need support for an external microphone. In either mode, it keeps a transcript of your session that you can mail to yourself, making it an interesting option for recording meetings. One experiment I haven’t tried yet is setting it up to record an entire talk given in a foreign language so I could see the transcript of the translated version.
Clever Cloud-Based eSIM Architecture and Hot Spot Feature
Since the device relies on the cloud for translation services, it needs to be connected to the internet to work. It supports Wi-Fi, as you’d expect, but it also comes with a pre-activated eSIM that works in many countries automatically. In my case, it provided perfect connectivity in France, Germany, and Croatia, but not Montenegro and Bosnia. Data is free for the first year, and the company says it will be inexpensive to renew after that.
The Genesis can also serve as a hot spot if you purchase a data plan for it. The company sells plans that you can purchase directly from the device. They aren’t incredibly cheap but are fairly competitive with other eSIM based offerings like Flexiroam. It also has a slot for a SIM card, which you can use with a local SIM card (after you’ve activated it using your phone or another device capable of that).
State-of-the-Art Translation
I tested the device with native speakers of Korean, Chinese, French, Serbian, and Croatian. In all cases, they were very impressed and rated the results — in both directions — as nearly flawless for typical conversation. Attempting to translate sentences from technical papers was more hit or miss, although even the native language speakers sometimes had a hard time figuring out how they would translate some terms in their papers.
Translation’s “Uncanny Valley”
Getting translations right is only the first part of making a really usable translation device. It’s also important that they happen fast enough to work for real-world interactions. It’s here that using the Genesis becomes tricky. Doing cloud-based translation using a selection of language models and engines takes time. It’s only a few seconds, but enough to interrupt the flow of a conversation and cause some discomfort for both you and the person you’re communicating with — at least until they understand what is happening and become adjusted to it. As a result, it is often hard to know whether the awkwardness of using the Genesis makes it the right way to approach an interaction, compared with simply muddling through the old-fashioned way.
Using the Langogo Genesis to Improve Your Language Skills
Langogo Genesis Interface: Ideas for Improvement
As impressive as the Genesis is at translating, there is some room for improvement in how you interface with the device. For starters, it’d be valuable for it to support Bluetooth, so that you could use it with earbuds or possibly a headset. It isn’t always desirable to have it blurt out translations — especially if you’re trying to understand what someone else is saying in a public setting.
Longer-term, it’d also be great if they could add a camera to mimic the functionality provided by Google Translate for decoding signs or other text. On a more straightforward note, the menu system is a little clumsy and could stand to be re-organized.