Baidu’s pocket translator is a ‘Star Trek’ dream come to life

Chinese search giant Baidu has long been investing in artificial intelligence research, whether it’s hiring away the creator of the Google Brain project, building autonomous cars or creating a recent A.I. which can mimic your voice after listening to it for only a short period of time. At this week’s MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco, Baidu gave a demo of one of its most impressive consumer-facing examples of A.I. to date: A Star Trek-style pocket universal translator that is able to translate spoken sentences from English into Mandarin and back again.