Perhaps the most convoluted conversation I've ever had occurred when my wife and I visited a tiny winery in Tuscany in the late 1990s. The winery was tucked into the stone city wall of Montepulciano, on a street barely wide enough for pedestrians, let alone our rental car. There was no sign above the tiny door, just the street number a sommelier had written down for us. An elderly man answered the door... but spoke no English, while we spoke no Italian.
We experimented and found he understood Spanish, which both my wife and I spoke because we had recently lived in Mexico. In addition, he spoke French, which I still mostly understood from three years in Brussels. So Kim and I would ask a question in Spanish, which he translated in his head into Italian. He responded in French, which, after some fumbling, I'd translate into English. And away we went — English to Spanish to Italian to French and back to English. We learned he was a sixth-generation wine maker, heard about and tasted his wines and purchased two dozen wonderful bottles.
An announcement last week from Apple will let us use AI to cut right to the chase: translating from any language to any other language in real time and via voice, not just text. The new AirPods won't guarantee you the wonderful morning that Kim and I spent with the charming Italian winemaker but will help the insurance industry with customer service.
The headline of the New York Times review of the Apple announcement pretty much says it all: "The New AirPods Can Translate Languages in Your Ears. This Is Profound."
The reviewer describes the AirPods as "the strongest example I had seen of AI technology working in a seamless, practical way that could be beneficial for lots of people. Children of immigrants who prefer to speak their native tongue may have an easier time communicating. Travelers visiting foreign countries may better understand cabdrivers, hotel staff and airline employees."
While the reviewer focuses on general use, not insurance, it's easy to see how the AirPods could help agents, brokers, customer service representatives and claims agents assist customers whose native language isn't English. And, while the natural tendency in the U.S. is to think about English-Spanish translation, the AirPods will, in time, be able to translate hundreds of languages into English or any other language. All you need is a set of AirPods for yourself and one to lend a client, and you can converse, with only about a one-second lag between the time you say something and when the other person hears the translation.
Translation apps of one sort or another have been available for a decade, but they've been clumsy. Some translated speech into text, which you had to then read or have the other person read, and you typically had to put your phone or other device in front of your mouth or of the person you were conversing with. The new AirPods have voice output, not only text, but mask ambient noise so well that they can be used as part of a normal conversation, some feet apart or over the phone.
Improvements from the large language models (LLMs) used in generative AI also make the translations much more accurate than they have been, because LLMs can grasp the whole context of a conversation and not just translate individual words — which can lead to the sorts of mistakes all too familiar to anyone who's ever learned a new language. (I once got caught in a rainstorm in Mexico and, walking into the office dripping wet, told my assistant, "Estoy muy morado," when I meant to say, "Estoy muy mojado." Instead of saying, 'I'm really wet," I said, "I'm really purple." He laughed and laughed and laughed.) Individual words can matter a lot in insurance conversations and contracts, so doublechecking will always be required at some level, but the Times reviewer said his review of the transcript of a long conversation with a Spanish speaker found only tiny errors, such as whether a noun should have been translated as masculine or feminine.
We've seen some duds among the bold attempts to embed AI in objects in the past — we're marking the 10-year anniversary of the cancellation of Google Glass, and the maker of the much-hyped Humane AI pin was sold for pennies on the dollar earlier this year — but, within a couple of years, the new AirPods should be a powerful tool for all kinds of individuals and businesses, including in insurance.
Estoy muy cierto.
Salud,
Pablo