PIXEL EARBUDS - Wireless Earbuds GOOGLE - Free user manual and instructions

Product Type	True Wireless Earbuds
Brand	Google
Model	Pixel Buds
Dimensions (per earbud)	Approximately 20 x 15 x 15 mm
Weight (per earbud)	Approximately 10 g
Charging case weight	Approximately 45 g
Power	Rechargeable lithium-ion battery via USB-C
Battery life (earbuds)	Up to 5 hours of listening
Battery life with case	Up to 24 hours
Connectivity	Bluetooth 5.0
Main features	Built-in Google Assistant, real-time translation, touch controls, hands-free calls
Noise reduction	Passive (ergonomic fit)
Protection rating	IPX4 (splash resistant)
Maintenance and cleaning	Clean with a soft, dry cloth. Do not use liquids.
Safety	Avoid exposure to excessive moisture and extreme temperatures.
Spare parts and repairability	Not user repairable. Contact Google support for any warranty repairs.
Compatibility	Android, iOS (Google Assistant app required)
Box contents	Earbuds, charging case, USB-C cable, ear tips of various sizes, quick start guide

Frequently Asked Questions - PIXEL EARBUDS GOOGLE

How do I connect the Pixel Buds to my phone?

Open the charging case, press and hold the pairing button on the back until the LED flashes, then select 'Pixel Buds' in your phone's Bluetooth settings.

What is the battery life of the Pixel Buds?

The earbuds offer up to 5 hours of continuous listening. With the charging case, you can get up to 24 hours of total battery life.

Are the Pixel Buds water resistant?

Yes, they are IPX4 certified, which protects against splashes and sweat, but they are not designed to be submerged.

How do I use the real-time translation feature?

Activate Google Assistant by touching the earbud, then say 'translate' or 'help me speak [language]'. You need to have the Google Translate app installed and configured.

How do I clean the Pixel Buds?

Use a soft, dry cloth to wipe the earbuds and case. Avoid any liquids. You can remove the silicone ear tips and wash them with clean water, then dry them thoroughly before reattaching.

What if only one earbud is not working?

Make sure both earbuds are charged. If the problem persists, reset the earbuds by holding the pairing button for 10 seconds, then reconnect them.

How do I update the firmware of the Pixel Buds?

Updates are done automatically via the Google Assistant app on your phone, when the earbuds are paired and connected to the internet.

Are the Pixel Buds compatible with iPhone?

Yes, they work with iOS via the Google Assistant app. However, some features like real-time translation may be limited.

How do I make a call with the Pixel Buds?

Double-tap the right earbud to answer or hang up. Press and hold to reject a call. Google Assistant can also make calls on voice command.

How do I adjust the volume of the Pixel Buds?

Swipe forward or backward on the right earbud to increase or decrease volume. Also use Google Assistant by saying 'turn up the volume'.

USER MANUAL PIXEL EARBUDS GOOGLE

How Google's Pixel Buds earphones translate languages

15 November 2017, by Ian Mcloughlin

Hand writing on a document with scattered alphanumeric characters, possibly from a language or text exercise.

Credit: Shutterstock

In the Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy, Douglas Adams's seminal 1978 BBC broadcast (then book, feature film and now cultural icon), one of the many technology predictions was the Babel Fish. This tiny yellow life-form, inserted into the human ear and fed by brain energy, was able to translate to and from any language.

Web giant Google have now seemingly developed their own version of the Babel Fish, called Pixel Buds. These wireless earbuds make use of Google Assistant, a smart application which can speak to, understand and assist the wearer. One of the headline abilities is support for Google Translate which is said to be able to translate up to 40 different languages. Impressive technology for under US\$200.

So how does it work?

Real-time speech translation consists of a chain of several distinct technologies – each of which have experienced rapid degrees of improvement over recent years. The chain, from input to output, goes like this:

Input conditioning: the earbuds pick up background noise and interference, effectively recording a mixture of the users' voice and other sounds. "Denoising" removes background sounds while a voice activity detector (VAD) is used to turn the system on only when the correct person is speaking (and not someone standing behind you in a queue saying "OK Google" very loudly). Touch control is used to improve the VAD accuracy.

Language identification (LID): this system uses machine learning to identify what language is being spoken within a couple of seconds. This is important because everything that follows is language specific. For language identification, phonetic characteristics alone are insufficient to distinguish languages (languages pairs like Ukrainian and Russian, Urdu and Hindi are virtually identical in their units of sound, or "phonemes"), so completely new acoustic representations had to be developed.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR): ASR uses an acoustic model to convert the recorded speech into a string of phonemes and then language modelling is used to convert the phonetic information into words. By using the rules of spoken grammar, context, probability and a pronunciation dictionary, ASR systems fill in gaps of missing information and correct mistakenly recognised phonemes to infer a textual representation of what the speaker said.

Natural language processing: NLP performs machine translation from one language to another. This is not as simple as substituting nouns and verbs, but includes decoding the meaning of the input speech, and then re-encoding that meaning as output speech in a different language - with all the nuances and complexities that make second languages so hard for us to learn.

Speech synthesis or text-to-speech (TTS): almost the opposite of ASR, this synthesises natural sounding speech from a string of words (or phonetic information). Older systems used additive

synthesis, which effectively meant joining together lots of short recordings of someone speaking different phonemes into the correct sequence. More modern systems use complex statistical speech models to recreate a natural sounding voice.

Putting it all together

So now we have the five blocks of technology in the chain, let's see how the system would work in practice to translate between languages such as Chinese and English.

Once ready to translate, the earbuds first record an utterance, using a VAD to identify when the speech starts and ends. Background noise can be partially removed within the earbuds themselves, or once the recording has been transferred by Bluetooth to a smartphone. It is then compressed to occupy a much smaller amount of data, then conveyed over WiFi, 3G or 4G to Google's speech servers.

Google's servers, operating as a cloud, will accept the recording, decompress it, and use LID technology to determine whether the speech is in Chinese or in English.

The speech will then be passed to an ASR system for Chinese, then to an NLP machine translator setup to map from Chinese to English. The output of this will finally be sent to TTS software for English, producing a compressed recording of the output. This is sent back in the reverse direction to be replayed through the earbuds.

This might seem like a lot of stages of communication, but it takes just seconds to happen. And it is necessary – firstly, because the processor in the earbuds is not powerful enough to do translation by itself, and secondly because their memory storage is insufficient to contain the language and acoustics models. Even if a powerful enough processor with enough memory could be squeezed in to the earbuds, the complex computer processing would deplete the earbud batteries in a couple of seconds.

Furthermore, companies with these kind of products (Google, iFlytek and IBM) rely on continuous improvement to correct, refine and improve their translation models. Updating a model is easy on their own cloud servers. It is much more difficult to do when installed in an earbud.

The late Douglas Adams would surely have found the technology behind these real life translating machines amazing – which it is. But computer scientists and engineers will not stop here. The next wave of speech-enabled computing could even be inspired by another fictional device, such as Iron Man's smart computer, J.A.R.V.I.S (Just Another Rather Very Intelligent System) from the Marvel series. This system would go way beyond translation, would be able to converse with us, understand what we are feeling and thinking, and anticipate our needs.

This article was originally published on The

Conversation. Read the original article.

Provided by The Conversation

APA citation: How Google's Pixel Buds earphones translate languages (2017, November 15) retrieved 9 December 2018 from https://techxplore.com/news/2017-11-google-pixel-buds-earphones-languages.html

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