About whether a real-time "Babel Fish" translator is feasible, following Meta's Seamless speech models.
Has this happened?
Yes 62 (49%)Not sure 49 (39%)No 16 (13%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether a real-time "Babel Fish" translator is feasible, following Meta's Seamless speech models.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Also a lot of spoken language involves context that AI is nowhere near understanding yet, let alone all the cultural baggage necessary to accurately translate/localize a lot of utterances.
"Can you stand up?" would be translated differently into Japanese depending on whether you're implying you need them to move their butt off your cell phone versus directly inquiring as to the function of their legs after a car accident. If you speak English and hear it as a background without the rest of the context being picked up, your brain instinctively knows it can interpret it either way, no problem.
But if you're Japanese and the AI picks a specific way to translate it, then you are completely unaware of the ambiguity because the AI resolved it with a 50% chance of being wrong.