Waverly Labs is a 20 person Brooklyn-based company that specializes in real-time translation through a pair of Bluetooth earbuds. The startup is on-hand at Mobile World Congress this week, showing off Pilot, its first piece of hardware, which launched at the end of last year. The product is the culmination of four years of research on both the hardware and software side of the equation, funded by a wildly success Indiegogo campaign that netted the company $4.4 million (around 3,000-percent of its initial goal). Pilot was made because being lost in translation has happened to everyone while traveling, even us, and that's exactly how the idea was born. Waverly Labs is at the convergence of wearable technology + machine translation, developing the world's first smart earpiece language translator.
Using the latest technologies in speech recognition, machine translation and the advances of wearable technology, our smart earpiece allows wearers to speak different languages but still clearly understand each other. Simply put, when one person speaks, the other hears it in their language.
Of course, Pilot is far from the only player in the real-time wearable translation space. The category is booming of late, including, most notably, Google’s Pixel Buds. Though unlike those headphones, this offering is translation first. And honestly, they’re pretty big for a pair of Bluetooth earbuds, so you probably wouldn’t want to use them your go-to headphones. The Pilot is currently up for purchase through Waverly’s site for $249 — nearly $100 more than Google’s admittedly mediocre Pixel Buds. You Might Also Like: Cross Helmet: Smart Helmet with 360 Degree Vision Ability.
