Living in multi-cultural Malaysia, most of us have been in situations where the group of people you're speaking to starts conversing in a language that you don't understand. Often time, it's something that happens naturally when someone is trying to explain something they only know how to explain in their mother tongue.
Malaysian Twitter user Roshen Maghhan dealt with the same problem recently. He begins the thread of his now-viral tweets saying that he used to work at a software development company where most of his colleagues would speak in Mandarin Chinese during meetings.
Despite him telling them to speak in English so that he could understand them better, they would revert to Chinese after a while. He thought of using the Google Pixel Buds, which translate what's being spoken to you in real time. However, the price of one was about RM780, which he deemed too expensive.
Being an engineering student, he decided to do the next best thing- to build the earphones himself! He looked up the hardware and software for the device, and paid $0.13 (RM0.54) to purchase Google Translate's API key, that helped him translate to the language that he wants.
If that wasn't impressive enough, he decided to write an algorithm to turn the speech into text in real time to help those who are deaf, while adding a feature where you could see who is saying what. Also, if the word is a topic in the conversation, the user can tap it to see all the information you need to know about it!
Roshen ends by saying that 'modern day problems require modern day solutions', and and 11 thousand people who have rewteeted his thread seem to be pretty impressed with his solution! The thread also has 12 thousand likes currently.
If he ends up selling these, we totally need to get one!
Cover source: Unsplash
