One of my favourite things about watching The Original Series Star Trek is in seeing how many technological developments which were supposedly hundreds of years away have already come into reality.

Take for example the food slots:

We now have them as microwaves:

The communicator:

and our cellphone:

I could go on and on. 

However, there is one piece of Star Trek technology that I thought was still a few years off: The Universal Translator.  The idea of the device is that it detects common concepts across different languages and provides on the fly translation to the differing parties.  It is a famous Star Trek Nerd response to any outsider who has the audacity to ask, “why do all the aliens speak English.”  They don’t, the universal translator translates all conversations into English.

The device was later explained to be embedded in the crews ears’ although in some episodes it’s depicted as a microphone like device:

Well the device has arrived. 

Here is the fascinating statistics behind the device:

Now admittedly, here you see the conversation participants typing, but with speech recognition, we introduce the Universal Translator:

Military Version:

IBM Version:

Microsoft Version:

And even on your Android phone:

and of course, the IPhone.