The ATA Chronicle - May/June 2018 - 29

speedy nonetheless considering all the
steps the data has to go through.

PRODUCT DESIGN, FIT, AND FINISH
The Translate One2One earpieces are
designed to fit over your right ear, and
are quite bulky by today's minimalist
earbud standards. Each earpiece has a
square touchscreen (three centimeters
square) and two mechanical buttons
at the top (the on/off switch and the
back button). Upon closer inspection,
I noticed that the folks at Lingmo had
repurposed a smartwatch form factor
to create the earpieces. The watchband
lugs (where the wristband usually
attaches to the watch) are secured to a
plastic frame that allows the earpiece to
rest over the top of your right ear once
it's attached to a soft rubber headband
that comes with the earpiece. That's
right, you are basically hanging a
smartwatch over your ear.
All this gives the earpiece a throwntogether feel. The on/off and back
buttons are so close to the plastic
frame that they're not easy to find and
press without looking at the earpiece
(especially for someone with big fingers),
which is hard to do when it's hanging on
your ear. The one-size-fits-all headband
is not very comfortable. It didn't fit
my head very well and didn't keep the
earpiece in the right place over my ear
when I turned my head. It constantly felt
like I needed to readjust it so it didn't
slip off the back of my head. Also, only
being able to wear the earpiece over the
right ear is problematic. What happens
if you prefer your left ear or are deaf in
your right? These observations aside, the
earpiece generally stayed over my ear,
and wearing the earpiece and headband
was comfortable enough to wear for
10- to 15-minute stints. On the positive
side, each earpiece comes with magnetic
charging points that make it easy to
connect the charging cable.

USER EXPERIENCE
User experience is the single most
important factor of any piece of consumer
technology, especially speech-to-speech
translators. If the technology hopes to
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If the technology hopes to wow
the end user, it has to work
right out of the box, be extremely
simple to use, and require
almost no training to make it
work. What's more, the device
needs to turn on quickly and
require as few steps as possible
to provide the service.

wow the end user, it has to work right out
of the box, be extremely simple to use,
and require almost no training to make
it work. What's more, the device needs
to turn on quickly and require as few
steps as possible to provide the service.
Otherwise, users will seldom have the
patience to use the technology.
Unfortunately, trying to use the
One2One earpieces to communicate was
an exercise in frustration, but not for the
reasons you might think. Out of the box,
it took me several attempts before I could
get the correct earpiece connected to the
internet and then connected to the other
earpiece by Bluetooth. One complicating
factor is that each earpiece is a full-fledged
miniature smartphone running the
Android operating system, complete with
24 pre-loaded apps and the possibility to
purchase and download even more from
Google Play.
Connecting the main earpiece to Wi-Fi
was a challenge. I had to type in a long
and complicated network password
on a microscopic keyboard on the
square screen (remember, it's only three
centimeters). I think it took me at least
five attempts before I finally got my extralarge fingers to tap the right keys on that
tiny screen. The size of the text on the
screen appeared to be between six- and
eight-point type-not easy for my middleaged eyes to read.
I never did successfully get the 1900
HMz earpiece for the Americas working
with a micro SIM card, in spite of the

fact that I tried three different ones and
even went to a local AT&T store to get
technical support. The technician couldn't
get the earpiece to connect to the mobile
data network. So, all my tests were
conducted using Wi-Fi.
Once you've connected the earpieces
and pre-selected your preferred language
combination, it only takes three taps
to begin a conversation. You touch the
screen, hear a beep, and begin speaking.
In theory, I was told by a Lingmo
representative, you should be able to
speak as long as necessary to complete
your thought and then touch the screen
again to begin the translation process. In
all my tests, however, the earpiece would
not let me talk for more than four seconds
at a time before it beeped again and
began the translation process. So, at best,
the One2One will really only work for
simple conversations in short chunks. No
complex sentences.
One other oversight that makes the
earpieces difficult to use is the lack of
volume control. When I first tested them
with a conversation partner, the initial
beep to begin talking for the Spanish
speaker was uncomfortably loud, so
much so that she immediately pulled
the earpiece off after wincing in pain.
Everyone's hearing is different and not
providing a simple way to adjust the
volume is a serious design flaw.

SOFTWARE PERFORMANCE
Let me start with the positives. The speech
recognition in the languages I was able to
check (English, German, Portuguese, and
Spanish) was very good. It isn't perfect,
but I didn't expect it to be. That said, it's
more than adequate for the application.
The speech synthesis was also quite
impressive in the languages I tested. It
was clear and easy to understand. The
U.S. English was a standard midwestern
accent, the Spanish a strong Peninsular
accent, and the Portuguese was notably
Brazilian (even though the earpiece
displays the Portuguese flag, which is
something I'm sure any Portuguese user
will note immediately).
The IBM Watson Language Translator3
was spotty at best. Although it did
produce an accurate sentence from
American Translators Association

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