Sometimes as part of “the press” we get opportunities to play with things, we would have never expected to. My past visits to CES (that just happened a couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas) have put me on press contact lists for all kinds of technology, unrelated to the video gaming category we usually cover. And that is the case with this amazing product from Time Kettle. They are the WT2 Edge earbuds. And they are what I see as the next step toward having the Star Trek Universal Translator.
We dream of being able to communicate in real-time with other people who don’t understand our language and Google Translate has done some cool things to allow us to translate into other Earth-originated languages but the real-time translation of the spoken word, yes it’s nearly here, and Time Kettle has the next generation of their development available now at a cost of around $350-400 per set.
I used the demo set sent to me by Time Kettle in my high school classroom last fall and found while it takes a little bit to get used to and learn how to use the app, the system is amazing. I felt this much so that I convinced my high school into buying 3 more sets of these to use for my Tech 1 class and in high school conferences.
In Perry Iowa, a ton of our students are first-generation born in the USA, and their parents often don’t speak fluent English. Most commonly they speak Latin American Spanish. I point that out because Time Kettle takes that info into account that there are different dialects within languages like in this case (Spain – Spanish and Latin American Spanish).
I have been asked to prepare a presentation and demonstration of these earbuds for an upcoming training of other teachers to show how they can use them for parent-teacher conferences and once that has been done I’ll be posting an update to this article (possibly a video). I was waiting to post this until after that demonstration but it’s been rescheduled a couple of times and I wanted to get the word out on this review. So stay tuned for the update.
In the meantime check out TimeKettle.Co or Amazon.Com for more information
This is the general editors account for Old School Gamer Magazine. Press releases and other general information sent to Old School Gamer are often posted here.
