Slashdot Mirror
CNBC: Google's New 'Pixel Buds' Suck (yahoo.com)
Google's new Pixel Buds "are really bad" and "not worth buying," according to CNBC's technology products editor:
The stand-out feature of Google Pixel Buds is that they're supposed to be able to translate spoken languages in near real-time. In my real-world tests, however, that wasn't the case at all. I took the Pixel Buds out on the streets of Manhattan, speaking to a Hungarian waiter in Little Italy, multiple vendors in Chinatown and more. If you press the right earbud and say "help me speak Chinese," for example, the buds will launch Google Translate, you can speak what you'd like to ask someone in another language, and a voice will read out the translated speech through your smartphone's speakers. Then, when someone replies, you'll hear that response through the Pixel Buds.
The microphone on the Pixel Buds is really bad, so it barely picked up my voice queries that I wanted to translate. I stood on the side of the road in Chinatown repeating myself at least 10 times trying to get the phone to pick up my speech in order to begin translation. It barely worked, even if I took the buds out and spoke directly into the microphone on the right earbud, and often only translated half of what I was trying to ask. In a quiet place, I was able to allow someone to respond to me, after which I'd hear the English translation through the headphones. That was neat, but it barely ever actually worked that way. To mitigate this, I found it was just easier to manually open the Google translate app, speak into my phone's microphone, and then let someone else also speak right into my phone. This executed the translation nearly perfectly, and meant that I didn't need the Pixel Buds at all.
The article ends by answering the question, Should you buy them? "Nope. There's nothing I recommend about the Pixel Buds.
"They're cheap-feeling and uncomfortable, and you're better off using the Google Translate app on a phone instead of trying to fumble with the headphones while trying to translate a conversation. The idea is neat, but it just doesn't work well enough to recommend to anyone on any level."
The microphone on the Pixel Buds is really bad, so it barely picked up my voice queries that I wanted to translate. I stood on the side of the road in Chinatown repeating myself at least 10 times trying to get the phone to pick up my speech in order to begin translation. It barely worked, even if I took the buds out and spoke directly into the microphone on the right earbud, and often only translated half of what I was trying to ask. In a quiet place, I was able to allow someone to respond to me, after which I'd hear the English translation through the headphones. That was neat, but it barely ever actually worked that way. To mitigate this, I found it was just easier to manually open the Google translate app, speak into my phone's microphone, and then let someone else also speak right into my phone. This executed the translation nearly perfectly, and meant that I didn't need the Pixel Buds at all.
The article ends by answering the question, Should you buy them? "Nope. There's nothing I recommend about the Pixel Buds.
"They're cheap-feeling and uncomfortable, and you're better off using the Google Translate app on a phone instead of trying to fumble with the headphones while trying to translate a conversation. The idea is neat, but it just doesn't work well enough to recommend to anyone on any level."
So, you take a brand new technology, that is expected to have some rough edges, you test it in the worst possibile environment (noisy and crowded streets with a lot of traffic) and you're surprised of the result? Moreover you used: a) a language (Chinese) that due to its nature is really difficult to recognize efficiently. b) a language (Italian) as spoken by Italian-Americans of several generations, so with a strong accent, regional influences and maybe a few grammatical errors in the mix (I'm Italian-Italian myself so I know what could be expected).
I'm not saying that Google buds are great, maybe they really do suck, but this sounds more like a rant than a well-informed test. Then, of course, can debate whether Apple's approach (bringing a technology on the market when it's mature, instead of jumping first on the bandwagon) works better or it's just a strategy to make your competitors fail in a series of inevitable pitfalls.
So you didn't read the summary?
Me neither.
The announcement of these things was buried pretty far under the rest of the announcements. I remember tech sites getting there eyes on it and screeching to the high heavens about how great they were going to be, and how you could translate languages without and internet connection and it would work perfectly and...
And of course not. If someone, anyone, had that tech they'd demonstrate it on stage front and center, hyping it to the high heavens. Instead it's just a crappy pair of earbuds, that most every reviewer out there thinks is crappy for reference, just in case you're getting cognitive dissonance and trying to rationalize how this bad review is obviously biased or something. Of course they buried the announcement and hoped no one would notice, they knew it these things were crap.
The current state of the audio filtering technology is not up snuff. So be it. These real-world tests will only make it stronger.
And when audio filtering does get good, the world will finally have a hearing aid that works.