MY HOVERCRAFT IS FULL OF EELS: AI tool lets users speak another language without learning a word.

A live translation tool could soon enable people to engage in conversations in real-time despite speaking different languages.

Facebook parent company Meta has launched a tool called Seamless which is able to take spoken or written communication and convert it almost instantly into another language.

The technology is able to work on more than 100 different languages and the Meta engineers behind the technology hope to one day create a real-life version of the talking Babel Fish gadget from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

In the book, the tool enables translation but modern technology has not yet been able to match the fictional capabilities.

I’m sure eventually, we’ll have the full Star Trek universal translator, but getting there is going to be quite a ride: