Everyone loves a good looking pair of wireless earbuds. Or, at least the fantasy of what they make possible: jaunting about, free from the tyranny of wires, with the sole goal of dancing your way through an urban snowscape until you serendipitously bump into the person you're destined to fall in love with.
The reality is perhaps just a tad bit different. Wireless earbuds — an entire class of products that's easy to lose and expensive to replace — are often more trouble than they're worth. I mean, you have to charge them. And yet, at this year's CES show in Las Vegas, we were finally convinced that the earbuds of the future may in fact come without wires.
SEE ALSO:LG's 'OLED Canyon' perfectly symbolizes the excess of CES 2018Allow me to explain. The Mars wireless headphones, from the Line and Naver corporations, have all the standard attributes you've come to expect from top of the line earbuds: ambient nose reduction, Bluetooth synching to your phone, and the ability to play your favorite jams. But they just so happen to also work as a realtime language translator.
Yes, we've seen variations on this tech before. Google's Pixel Buds, for example, claim to translate conversations in realtime. But those "wireless" earbuds are still connected to each other by a wire, meaning they're designed for one person and one person only to wear. Sure, this would help Pixel Buds wearing Person A understand foreign-language speaker Person B, but what happens when Person A tries to respond?
Mars, which is designed to enable a two-way conversation across languages, takes care of this problem. Because the earbuds are truly wireless, all you need is one set paired to a single smartphone with the Naver Papago Translate app. Just share one earbud with the foreign-language speaker and start talking.
We're not the only ones impressed with the tech. The Mars earbuds were awarded a 2018 Best of Innovation award at CES this year. And while the translation app still does, as most translation apps do, have room to improve, Mars convincingly makes the case that the hardware is ready and waiting.
It also managed to convince us that there's finally a good reason to buy wireless earbuds. Now, all we need is for Line and Naver to sell them to the public, something a representative at the companies' CES Unveiled booth told Mashable will happen sometime over the course of this year.
We'll be waiting.
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