 This app demeans us both |
Phone Application Translates Babies’ Howls – Wired
The Cry Translator listens to a whining child and analyzes the pitch, volume, tone and inflection of his nerve-jangling noise. Ten seconds later, it provides you with one of five “translations”: hungry, sleepy, stressed, annoyed or bored.
The idea of this $30 iPhone application, apart from preying on the anxieties of new parents, is to help teach you the meanings of the distinctive sounds and to help out babysitters who might otherwise try to feed your three-month old (hunger) instead of just switching over to the Family Guy from American Idol (bored). The application even gives advice on what to do, depending on the translation.
According to the seller, Biloop Technologic, clinical tests have proven the app to be accurate 96% of the time, and it will “continue to translate crying regardless of the age of the child”.
Can’t be bothered trying to understand your baby? There’s an app for that. Seriously, I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’s tried it.
I got circumsized as a baby and it hurt so bad I didn’t walk for a year. “Hurt like a bitch” wasn’t one of the translations I see.
Funny – I think Maggie Simpson used one of those in a show years back….
There IS some effort to teach the very young ones some kind of sign language. Seems to work….
When my daughter started to talk, she sort of scrambled the words, and invented her own. It was easier (for a while) to learn her language than to try to teach her mine. Drove my wife nuts….
And how many accents and dialects does this app understand? German? French? Spanish? Ebonic?
Baby’s cries do have meaning – (yes just like words) They were clearly distinguishable. Between my wife and I, we had it sussed. We only found 3 though, hungry, dirty, and sleepy. By the time we had our third kid we were keeping the screaming to a minimum. I don’t know if a machine would hear the difference though, seems pretty unlikely to me.
Under Obama Kare this would be a required application, every new parent will be forced to buy it or be fined for non-compliance.
So is this a sneaky way to be able to play ‘shake the baby’ again?
You pick a particular cry, wait till the phone identifies it, and then you can pick up and shake the shit out of a real baby instead of just jiggling your iPhone like the original app.
I believe the proper spelling is “weaning”, as in weaning the baby off of the nipple, bottle, etc. Just saying. 🙂
[Right you are. Clearly I was thinking of the band Ween.- Ed.]
gah gah goo
stupid is, as stupid does.
Babies’ cries ARE recognizable.
That an app could do it is highly likely.
The ISSUE, however is why.
Parents can (or should be able to – particularly with attention and training.) also do this. IF a parent isn’t learning to pay attention to the needs of an infant, what will they do for the child’s FUTURE development?
Oh! There’ll be an app for that, too?
(Oh, and “iKare4U”, you are an idiot!)