I loaded the language coverage into Datasette Lite and added some facets here:

https://lite.datasette.io/?json=https://gist.github.com/simo...

Here's how I did that: https://gist.github.com/simonw/63aa33ec827b093f9c6a2797df950...

Here are the top 20 represented language families:

    Niger-Congo 1,019
    Austronesian 609
    Sino-Tibetan 288
    Indo-European 278
    Afro-Asiatic 222
    Trans-New Guinea 219
    Otomanguean 149
    Nilo-Saharan 131
    Austro-Asiatic 100
    Dravidian 60
    Australian 51
    Creole 45
    Kra-Dai 43
    Uto-Aztecan 41
    Quechuan 36
    Language isolate 35
    Torricelli 32
    Maipurean 31
    Mayan 30
    Sepik 30

Thanks -- great way to visualize how massive this set of languages really is.

All this great work and the prior sota translations and Meta still only accepts Nort American english voice control in their VR equipment lol.

Based on the availability of STT, TTS, and translation models available to download in that github repo, a real-life babelfish is 'only' some glue code away. Wild times we're living in.

Nah, full-on babelfish is simply not possible. The meaning of the beginning of a sentence can be modified retroactively by the end of the sentence. This means that the Babelfish must either be greatly delayed or awkwardly correct itself every once in a while.

That’s why the babelfish translates brainwaves rather than sounds, which is especially important for communicating with our nonverbal alien neighbors.

It’s also good at translating the vagaries of alien poetry into English

Ah, reminds me of learning German, where you can chuck all the verbs onto the end. There was this sentence we had as a fun toy example, where it was like half a paragraphs of verbs in the end, and you had to try and match them up with the beginning of the sentence.

Edit:found a reference to it https://www.reddit.com/r/German/comments/ul0xgt/just_for_fun...

Joke that I heard was supposed to come from the 1880s.

Some travelers stop off at an inn in the Swiss Alps, and they notice that are the various tables at the inn are other nationalities. They amuse themselves by listening in on the conversations (and displaying their stereotypes) - the Italians are all talking at the same time very loud and never stop moving their hands, the French are all arrogant artistes, the Danes are boring and only talk about the weather, and then they notice the Germans.

There was obviously a very important conversation going on with the Germans because one German would say something and every other German would stop and listen intently until they were done, and then another one would start up and every one would stop and listen intently until that one was done, but in following the conversation it became clear it was not because the conversation was important, but because the Germans were waiting to hear the verb to understand what was being said.

And sometimes that modification is not just "we don't know which verb it ends in" but "the whole structure is different than expected":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

sometimes humans too don't know what they're going to say until they've said it

Close enough for practical value. Yes, big downside. But personally I’d use it.

Between the options of "you can't talk to this person" and "your conversation will have some delays", I know which I'd choose.

I wonder how well a LLM could guess the end of the sentence though. Most of the time decently well?

I wonder if an esolang exists that could be a universal target though (if a language can handle any ambiguity by appending, then it could always be output without backtracking).

Ithkuil?

So just add 5 seconds of latency?

AFAIK STT is still very bad without speaker-specific fine-tuning, so it's not going to be a literal babelfish (translating in the ear of the receiver), but it could make you speak many languages.

Your interlocutor's earpiece could beam yours a delta for a finetuned model of their voice before they open their mouth. Except not compatible across iMessage users and whatsapp users or some other predictable silicon valley negative sum power play like that.

Despite any shortcomings, Google Translate is still a technological marvel.

Modern translation apps and GPS are godsends that make travel a million times easier. And they're free! It blows my mind. Traveling would be so much more incredibly difficult without them.

Google Translate is still inferior to ChatGPT 3.5. I suspect this style of model is significantly more expensive to run and Google doesn't want to give it away for free. Really, the only problem with ChatGPT is that it refuses to translate things that go against its nanny programming, which can make it almost worse than useless in some real-life situations.

I tried ChatGPT 3.5 against Google Translate, translating English to Greek, my native language, and they perform almost the same. The text was difficult text of science fiction, fantasy stuff and the results were tolerable. Roughly 50% of the text had to be manually rewritten.

Maybe for more casual sentences and not so difficult text, they perform better, i haven't tried. Anyways, they are both better than nothing.

Performance does vary with languages. In italian GPT blows translate away. The UI is not as nice but at least you can get it to translate to multiple languages in one go.