It sounds like every lazy expat's dream - a portable device that will almost instantly translate anything you say into any one of a number of languages, and translate right back into English anything said to you.
True, Raytheon's BBN TransTalk wasn't the most eye-catching piece of equipment on show at the defence exhibition Idex 2013 in Abu Dhabi last month.
Among all the guns, ships and unmanned drones, the simple belt-worn device, about the size of an iPad mini and complete with a hand-held microphone, was always going to struggle to turn heads.
But what it did promise was to enable soldiers who could speak only English to understand, and make themselves understood in Arabic, Pashto, Dari, Farsi, Malaysian and Indonesian.
TransTalk is, of course, attuned to military parlance and some of the conversational gambits at which it excels.
"This is ammunition," the machine's robotic voice faithfully translates during a demonstration at an imaginary Iraq checkpoint.
"It is illegal", might be of limited assistance to a newly arrived expat dealing with, say, the intricacies of securing a residential visa.
But there is no doubting the technological achievement.
The road from speech-recognition programs, which allow your computer or smartphone to convert what you say into the written word, to instantaneous multilingual verbal translation has proved a long and surprisingly difficult one.
The first step was to make computers understand what people were saying.
It began in 1952 with Audrey, an "Automatic Speech Recogniser" developed by Bell Laboratories. Audrey was not that smart. In fact, she could recognise only the first 10 numbers, with accuracy ranging from 60 to 99 per cent.
Sixty years on from Audrey, voice recognition is much better - common, in fact, especially on annoying automated telephone switchboards. But it can still be cranky, as anyone who has been told "I'm sorry, I did not understand that request", while trying to book cinema tickets will know.
The consistency of all such systems is hampered by the fact that language comes out of any one person's mouth in many different ways, depending on whether we are tired, angry, in a hurry and so on.
Take Apple's Siri, a voice-recognition application bought by Apple in 2010 and now built into its iPads, iPhones and computers.
Depending on how its user speaks, it is just as capable of hearing the phrase "Drop the weapon and put your hands in the air" as "Doctor with your hands on here" or "Top the weather in Tanzania".
Even when computers are reading the typed word, and aren't being asked to hear and understand a language in an almost unlimited range of accents and dialects, they can still struggle to translate accurately.
Take this phrase, from the website VisitAbuDhabi.ae: "Cheap taxis, a well-planned road system and plenty of sidewalks make Abu Dhabi easy to navigate."
Google translates the original Arabic thus: "The low tariff taxis and good planning roads, are all factors that led to the ease of navigation in Abu Dhabi", while Bing offers "The low rate of taxis and good road layout are all factors that led to easy navigation in Abu Dhabi".
Minor differences, perhaps, but differences all the same - which makes applications such as Raytheon's TransTalk all the more impressive.
On-the-go, two-way instantaneous voice translation is, doubtless, the next big thing and it is only a matter of time before more civilian-friendly solutions are on the market. Apple has hinted it is in the game but so far it is Microsoft that is leading the pack.
Fans of Star Trek: Enterprise will recall the Universal Translator, as wielded by Ensign Hoshi Sato, the communications officer on board the starship.
"We may not have to wait until the 22nd century for a usable equivalent," blogged Rick Rashid, Microsoft's global head of research, last year.
To prove his point, in October he addressed an audience at the Computing in the 21st Century Conference in Tianjin, China, demonstrating an as-yet-unnamed Microsoft technology that allowed him to speak in English - and be heard almost simultaneously in Chinese.
"The results are not perfect. There are quite a few errors," he said (to wild applause when the translation followed in Chinese, with an electronic voice mimicking the speaker's own speech patterns for once, rather than those of Stephen Hawking).
The message was loud and clear: the Universal Translator will be a consumer reality in the very near future. Some say Microsoft's version could be on the market this year.
But is that really such a great idea?
Microsoft's Rashid obviously thinks so and doubtless legions of IT proselytisers share his view that "as barriers to understanding language are removed, barriers to understanding each other might also be removed".
For cynics, such Utopian talk might bring to mind the cautionary tale of the Babel Fish, encountered in Douglas Adams's book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
By removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, the Babel Fish "caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation".
Fanciful, perhaps. But some language and cultural observers see a more likely disaster looming.
They believe that relying on a machine to translate for us, rather than actually bothering to learn another language, is part of an insidious process by which computers are slowly but surely undermining the way our brains function.
Back in 2004, researchers at University College London scanned the brains of 105 people and found that learning another language developed grey matter in much the same way that exercise developed muscle.
In 2010 a study of Alzheimer's patients in Canada, published in the journal Neurology, showed that on average patients who spoke two languages were diagnosed with the condition more than four years later than their monolingual peers.
In other words, one does not have to be a fan of the Terminator film franchise to see that lazily ceding yet another human brain task to machines is not such a great idea.
In 2008, The Atlantic magazine carried an influential cover story by the author Nicholas Carr, under the headline "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?".
On the surface, it sounds like a fairly counter-intuitive proposition. After all, thanks to the internet and Google, the web's most ubiquitous agent, more human knowledge is available to more people than ever before in history.
But what if such ease of access to wisdom was impeding our ability to think for ourselves?
"Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory," wrote Carr, who traded up his Atlantic article into a book that was shortlisted for a 2011 Pulitzer Prize.
"Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy … now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do."
It won't be long, perhaps, before the only reading of which humans are capable will be the instructions for uploading software - and, of course, anything written in 140 characters or less.
But what about speaking?
After Microsoft's Rashid gave his virtuoso performance in China last year, Time magazine's applause was muted by a sneaking concern that removing the need to learn another language might have a negative effect on our cognitive abilities.
"Doesn't learning another language actually increase our brainpower?" it fretted. "Would externalising that diminish us somehow?"
Language experts certainly think so.
Way back in October 2007, the Duke University Talent Identification Programme, a non-profit organisation dedicated to assisting academically talented children, responded with concern to budget-driven cuts in foreign-language teaching in American schools, declaring them a false economy.
Duke TIP drew support from a number of language experts, among them Therese Sullivan Caccavale, president of the National Network for Early Language Learning.
All of the research evidence, she said, showed learning a foreign language enhanced children's cognitive development, giving them advantages over peers who did not - including in apparently unrelated subjects such as maths.
Whether or not the internet, Google, Microsoft, Apple et al really are making us dumber, Google is certainly set to make us all at least look pretty stupid, with an imminent product that is designed to make taking time out from our computer-controlled lives harder than ever.
It's not every day that one sees a billionaire riding the subway, but New Yorkers (and a tipped-off photographer) did in January.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin was seen wearing a prototype of Google Glass - spectacles equipped with a miniature camera, computer and heads-up, "mid air" display screen.
Talk nicely to your glasses and, among many other things, they will take a picture, film some video, send a dictated email, show you the nearest restaurants, the temperature in the city you are planning to fly to and countless other things for which smartphones and, er, our brains used to be so essential.
Increasingly, it seems, we are to think less for ourselves and to store less information about the world around us in our brains.
Personal-technology enthusiasts celebrate the blurring of the distinction between our brains and the computers, in all their forms, that increasingly serve as their remote hard drives.
Dr Gerald Crabtree, a geneticist at Stanford University, California, is not one such enthusiast. In February he published a study in the journal Trends in Genetics claiming technological advances were dumbing down human intellect.
"I would wager," he said, "that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas and a clear-sighted view of important issues."
The problem is, with lost languages unlikely to figure on Google's pulldown translation menu, it would all be so much Ancient Greek to us.
news@thenational.ae
THE BIO:
Sabri Razouk, 74
Athlete and fitness trainer
Married, father of six
Favourite exercise: Bench press
Must-eat weekly meal: Steak with beans, carrots, broccoli, crust and corn
Power drink: A glass of yoghurt
Role model: Any good man
F1 The Movie
Starring: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Rating: 4/5
Ten tax points to be aware of in 2026
1. Domestic VAT refund amendments: request your refund within five years
If a business does not apply for the refund on time, they lose their credit.
2. E-invoicing in the UAE
Businesses should continue preparing for the implementation of e-invoicing in the UAE, with 2026 a preparation and transition period ahead of phased mandatory adoption.
3. More tax audits
Tax authorities are increasingly using data already available across multiple filings to identify audit risks.
4. More beneficial VAT and excise tax penalty regime
Tax disputes are expected to become more frequent and more structured, with clearer administrative objection and appeal processes. The UAE has adopted a new penalty regime for VAT and excise disputes, which now mirrors the penalty regime for corporate tax.
5. Greater emphasis on statutory audit
There is a greater need for the accuracy of financial statements. The International Financial Reporting Standards standards need to be strictly adhered to and, as a result, the quality of the audits will need to increase.
6. Further transfer pricing enforcement
Transfer pricing enforcement, which refers to the practice of establishing prices for internal transactions between related entities, is expected to broaden in scope. The UAE will shortly open the possibility to negotiate advance pricing agreements, or essentially rulings for transfer pricing purposes.
7. Limited time periods for audits
Recent amendments also introduce a default five-year limitation period for tax audits and assessments, subject to specific statutory exceptions. While the standard audit and assessment period is five years, this may be extended to up to 15 years in cases involving fraud or tax evasion.
8. Pillar 2 implementation
Many multinational groups will begin to feel the practical effect of the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax (DMTT), the UAE's implementation of the OECD’s global minimum tax under Pillar 2. While the rules apply for financial years starting on or after January 1, 2025, it is 2026 that marks the transition to an operational phase.
9. Reduced compliance obligations for imported goods and services
Businesses that apply the reverse-charge mechanism for VAT purposes in the UAE may benefit from reduced compliance obligations.
10. Substance and CbC reporting focus
Tax authorities are expected to continue strengthening the enforcement of economic substance and Country-by-Country (CbC) reporting frameworks. In the UAE, these regimes are increasingly being used as risk-assessment tools, providing tax authorities with a comprehensive view of multinational groups’ global footprints and enabling them to assess whether profits are aligned with real economic activity.
Contributed by Thomas Vanhee and Hend Rashwan, Aurifer
The alternatives
• Founded in 2014, Telr is a payment aggregator and gateway with an office in Silicon Oasis. It’s e-commerce entry plan costs Dh349 monthly (plus VAT). QR codes direct customers to an online payment page and merchants can generate payments through messaging apps.
• Business Bay’s Pallapay claims 40,000-plus active merchants who can invoice customers and receive payment by card. Fees range from 1.99 per cent plus Dh1 per transaction depending on payment method and location, such as online or via UAE mobile.
• Tap started in May 2013 in Kuwait, allowing Middle East businesses to bill, accept, receive and make payments online “easier, faster and smoother” via goSell and goCollect. It supports more than 10,000 merchants. Monthly fees range from US$65-100, plus card charges of 2.75-3.75 per cent and Dh1.2 per sale.
• 2checkout’s “all-in-one payment gateway and merchant account” accepts payments in 200-plus markets for 2.4-3.9 per cent, plus a Dh1.2-Dh1.8 currency conversion charge. The US provider processes online shop and mobile transactions and has 17,000-plus active digital commerce users.
• PayPal is probably the best-known online goods payment method - usually used for eBay purchases - but can be used to receive funds, providing everyone’s signed up. Costs from 2.9 per cent plus Dh1.2 per transaction.
Our Time Has Come
Alyssa Ayres, Oxford University Press
Company profile
Company: Rent Your Wardrobe
Date started: May 2021
Founder: Mamta Arora
Based: Dubai
Sector: Clothes rental subscription
Stage: Bootstrapped, self-funded
Who was Alfred Nobel?
The Nobel Prize was created by wealthy Swedish chemist and entrepreneur Alfred Nobel.
- In his will he dictated that the bulk of his estate should be used to fund "prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind".
- Nobel is best known as the inventor of dynamite, but also wrote poetry and drama and could speak Russian, French, English and German by the age of 17. The five original prize categories reflect the interests closest to his heart.
- Nobel died in 1896 but it took until 1901, following a legal battle over his will, before the first prizes were awarded.
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Xpanceo
Started: 2018
Founders: Roman Axelrod, Valentyn Volkov
Based: Dubai, UAE
Industry: Smart contact lenses, augmented/virtual reality
Funding: $40 million
Investor: Opportunity Venture (Asia)
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
About Okadoc
Date started: Okadoc, 2018
Founder/CEO: Fodhil Benturquia
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: Healthcare
Size: (employees/revenue) 40 staff; undisclosed revenues recording “double-digit” monthly growth
Funding stage: Series B fundraising round to conclude in February
Investors: Undisclosed
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
THE APPRENTICE
Director: Ali Abbasi
Starring: Sebastian Stan, Maria Bakalova, Jeremy Strong
Rating: 3/5
Tips on buying property during a pandemic
Islay Robinson, group chief executive of mortgage broker Enness Global, offers his advice on buying property in today's market.
While many have been quick to call a market collapse, this simply isn’t what we’re seeing on the ground. Many pockets of the global property market, including London and the UAE, continue to be compelling locations to invest in real estate.
While an air of uncertainty remains, the outlook is far better than anyone could have predicted. However, it is still important to consider the wider threat posed by Covid-19 when buying bricks and mortar.
Anything with outside space, gardens and private entrances is a must and these property features will see your investment keep its value should the pandemic drag on. In contrast, flats and particularly high-rise developments are falling in popularity and investors should avoid them at all costs.
Attractive investment property can be hard to find amid strong demand and heightened buyer activity. When you do find one, be prepared to move hard and fast to secure it. If you have your finances in order, this shouldn’t be an issue.
Lenders continue to lend and rates remain at an all-time low, so utilise this. There is no point in tying up cash when you can keep this liquidity to maximise other opportunities.
Keep your head and, as always when investing, take the long-term view. External factors such as coronavirus or Brexit will present challenges in the short-term, but the long-term outlook remains strong.
Finally, keep an eye on your currency. Whenever currency fluctuations favour foreign buyers, you can bet that demand will increase, as they act to secure what is essentially a discounted property.
The biog
Favourite hobby: I love to sing but I don’t get to sing as much nowadays sadly.
Favourite book: Anything by Sidney Sheldon.
Favourite movie: The Exorcist 2. It is a big thing in our family to sit around together and watch horror movies, I love watching them.
Favourite holiday destination: The favourite place I have been to is Florence, it is a beautiful city. My dream though has always been to visit Cyprus, I really want to go there.
The%20Hunger%20Games%3A%20The%20Ballad%20of%20Songbirds%20%26%20Snakes
%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EDirector%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%C2%A0Francis%20Lawrence%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EStars%3A%C2%A0%3C%2Fstrong%3ERachel%20Zegler%2C%20Peter%20Dinklage%2C%20Viola%20Davis%2C%20Tom%20Blyth%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3ERating%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E3%2F5%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
