> in star trek

Heh. On the other hand, we are seeing so much negativity around "AI", while we have access to something as close as possible to the "universal communicator" from trek. There are now several CotS things you can buy that basically serve this purpose. You can walk into a mall, buy one, and travel to the most remote place on Earth, speak in your own language, and almost anyone else can speak in their own language, and through technomagic the two of you can communicate. And yet there's so much pessimism...

Yup. People still don't believe when I say that we've cracked universal translation with LLMs. That's despite the proof being in their hands; anyone with any SOTA multimodal LLM app (read: Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini) with "advanced voice" / "live mode" can test it on the spot: just launch it and tell it will hear multiple languages and its task is to translate what it hears in one language to the other, and vice versa.