People around the world are being urged to wear face masks when out in public, and it hasn't taken long for the functionality of a mask to be greatly enhanced thanks to technology.
As CNN reports, Japanese startup Donut Robotics looks to be one of the first to add genuinely useful extra functionality to a face mask. It created the C-Face Smart Mask, and it's capable of amplifying the wearer's voice to make it clearer, but can also transcribe dictation and translate speech into eight different languages including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indonesian, English, Spanish, and French.
As you'd expect, the mask doesn't work on its own, instead relying on a wireless link to a smartphone and Donut Robotics' software. The associated app uses machine learning to handle language translation, which Donut Robotics CEO Taisuke Ono claims is "better than Google API, or other popular technologies" for Japanese. The link to a smartphone is achieved using Bluetooth and apparently works up to 32 feet away from the mask.
The company is expecting to make the mask available from January 2021 at a cost of roughly $38. If you want to take advantage of the translation and dictation features, there's going to be a monthly charged, but the ongoing cost has yet to be disclosed. It also seems likely this will be the first of many smart masks to appear in the coming months, because companies are now realizing this is a new category of wearables and there's the potential for millions of customers.
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