Why I'm excited about the Google Buds

Let's say you're travelling in a new city where you don't speak the local language. You still need to somehow get around, so you try your best to communicate with the people around you.

But what if it was possible to communicate with these people seamlessly without having to learn their language?

Such a "Babel Fish" does not yet exist, we're very far away from it, but could you imagine the possibilities? Entertain the idea a little.

Maybe you could ask locals where the best restaurants are and they'll tell you about a place that doesn't show up on TripAdvisor or Google. Or maybe you could ask them where about must-see locations around the city. Who knows!

Having your own personal translator everywhere you go could fundamentally change the way humans interact with each other if there is a language barrier.

That's why I'm excited about the Google Buds. It shows that it might one day be possible to live in such a world where language barriers don't exist. The Google Buds will definitely not be the last pair of headphones that help translate speech in near real-time, as more and more companies try to solve this problem.

I just think that Google is well positioned to be a leader since their hardware could lean on the Google Translate service pretty heavily.

With their other services like speech-to-text, what if there was real-time translation and auto-transcription, for people who can't hear? It's as if the democratization of human communication could be a possibility as well.

What are your thoughts? Would love to hear them!

Tom