Maybe you've seen a viral video named "Kisses in Japan" where an English man used a device to translate from English to Japanese. The controversial video gathered a million view within just 22 days and has become talk of town in english speaking nation and in Japan. The video is trying to promote a product called "ILI" a portable translation device by challenging himself that he'll be able to kiss a woman by using the device.
ILI is the latest device designed by the LOGBAR, the same innovation corporation that designed the high-tech gadget RingZero, According to the presskit from ILI's website. The first generation Ili is designed to translate English to Japanese, and English to Chinese without using internet connection such as Wi-Fi, 3G, or 4G while next generation would cover "French, Thai, Korean, Spanish, Italian and Arabic." The purpose of ILI is mainly to allow consumers to be able travel to places without any language barrier between two different language.
Design
ILI is designed to be portable. The device is attached to a necklace in which the speaker have to pick up the device and click the button to activate translation mode. The name ILI may sound like apple's "Siri" and the sole button visible in ILI's brochure looks similar with apple iphone 5s' home button. The speaker is said to be 4 times louder than ordinary smartphone speakers. However, there's no information on ILI's official website if it auto detects language spoken by the user, or if there's a button, we will soon find out once we had a chance to test the product.
As of now, there's no concrete detail on how accurate the translator is. But according to ILI's website, the translator of ILI uses the travel library of lexicon dictionary. So meaning, it collected different statements, or phrases frequently used by travelers, unlike Google Translate's direct word-to-word translation which is harder to understand especially when it comes to sentence construction.
Release Date
According to the website of ILI, the device will be able for pre-selling, while the whole units will be sold by summer of 2016. Prices of ILI has not announced yet, but according to some sources, it will be cheap.
Marketing
The ILI device ad was first released in YouTube last January 4, 2016 with a viral ad entitled "KISSES IN JAPAN." The video quickly became viral due to its disturbing and creepy ad of an English man trying to score a kiss with woman by politely asking them using the ILI translator. The video however, was critisized and denounced by different netizen due to its "rude" approach to women. Some accused the video as sexist, while some felt insulted instead of being amazed with the product.
Some take it as mock to Japanese society. Japanese culture is known as one of the most respectful and obedient society in the world.
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