Not quite the Universal Translator from Star Trek but not bad

[Gingerbread Demon]

https://www.imore.com/best-language-translation-devices

Not quite the Star Trek UT device but we are getting there. Small sample of real time translator devices.

I particularly like that last one in that list for its screen and prompts.

 

[publiusr]

There is some progress on the front
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-automatic-text-simplification-efficacy-foreign.html

Why some things just sound wrong to us.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-10-wrong-brains.html

landscapes into soundscapes
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Internat...led-development-speech-new/story?id=105774893

https://www.livescience.com/archaeo...n-us-southwest-surpasses-wildest-expectations
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3...f-mysterious-magnetic-anomaly-scientists-find

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

That's interesting Ware....

 

[Birb-of-Prey]

What happens if I just screech and gibber at it?

 

[publiusr]

Can't help you there---but a big breakthrough has occurred in decoding the past at least:

Pāṇini's system—4,000 rules detailed in his greatest work, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, which is thought to have been written around 500 BC—is meant to work like a machine: Feed in the base and suffix of a word and it should turn them into grammatically correct words and sentences through a step-by-step process. https://phys.org/news/2022-12-ancient-grammatical-puzzle-years.html

I could see that work expanding.

We are on the way to a protoplaser:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-12-cellular-regenerate-tissues-wounds-regrow.html
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-scientists-hydrogel-materials-stem-cells.html

Of course, the holy grail is the tricorder---toys have been made of it that are little more than recorders, temperature takers, etc.

But what a tricorder really is-- is something that can tell you what a thing is made of without taking it to a lab--a scan at a glance.

That actually looks possible now:
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-standoff-coherent-raman-spectrometer.html
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-2d-material-enable-ultra-sharp-cellphone.html

A raman spectrometer, linked with a gas chromatorgraph and other portable radar and terahertz tech---all together---I would call that a true Tricorder.