Jibbigo was doing decent voice-to-voice translation entirely locally back in the iPhone 3GS days. You still had all the usual pitfalls of voice recognition and machine translation, but it was good enough to be useful.
Your FAQ link isn't loading for me (hugged to death?) but I watched the video on the page HN links to here and I see nothing in it that's infeasible. As with any voice recognition and machine translation product, you'll probably need to be patient and tolerant of many errors, and I wouldn't be surprised if they gloss over that, but it could still be useful.
Edit: the FAQ finally loaded. I don't see anything particularly remarkable in there. There are no promises for battery life, speed, or accuracy. The basic premise of offline voice-to-voice translation is totally doable and has been done.
Your FAQ link isn't loading for me (hugged to death?) but I watched the video on the page HN links to here and I see nothing in it that's infeasible. As with any voice recognition and machine translation product, you'll probably need to be patient and tolerant of many errors, and I wouldn't be surprised if they gloss over that, but it could still be useful.
Edit: the FAQ finally loaded. I don't see anything particularly remarkable in there. There are no promises for battery life, speed, or accuracy. The basic premise of offline voice-to-voice translation is totally doable and has been done.