🖖 Star Trek’s universal translator is real now

It’s Monday, {{first_name | friend}}, and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. This is a time to remember that small actions add up to big change.

🐐 Now for something lighter. One tech giant went full baa-baa green and hires 200 goats to handle its lawn care. No mowers. No landscapers. Just goats doing goat things. Which company went full barnyard?  A) Apple, B) Microsoft, C) Google or D) Amazon? Your answer is munching on grass and waiting at the end. No kidding.

🛑 Big Tech algorithms decide what you see. Prove you want my free newsletter. Open it, click at least three links, and reply with a Hello. That’s how you train the robots to leave us alone. Thanks for being here, you’re the reason this works. — Kim

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⚡ TL;DR (THE SHORT VERSION)

📖 Read time: 2.5 minutes

I don’t speak any language but English. I’ve tried Rosetta Stone. I’ve tried Duolingo. Nope. 

Strangely, after one very strong lemon drop martini in the Galápagos Islands, I was suddenly fluent in high school Spanish. Sadly, that method doesn’t scale.

In 1966, Star Trek gave us the universal translator. In 2026, it’s an app, and it’s changing how the world talks. We’ve moved past the clunky robot voice of early Google Translate. Today’s AI-powered translation captures intent, tone, sarcasm, and even bad jokes in real time.

Let’s start with something amazing. Timekettle won all kinds of awards for its W4 AI Interpreter Earbuds (5% off, $330) at CES 2026. Pop one in your ear, give the other to someone speaking another language and have a natural conversation with about a half-second delay. The earbuds auto-detect 43 languages and 96 accents with 98% accuracy. Incredible.

They work on phone calls, too, translating both sides automatically. Don’t buy these expecting to jam out to music though, they’re built for translation, not tunes.

Want alternatives? Google Pixel Buds Pro 2 ($229) paired with Google Translate work great if you’re already in the Google ecosystem. The ANFIER A8 (8% off, $240) supports 144 languages and doesn’t require a phone, it has a built-in touch screen. Budget pick: Tagry’s earbuds (17% off, $100) cover 164 languages.

Need occasional translation help? Apps like Google Translate and iTranslate offer free real-time conversation mode. Pro versions with offline access, essential without Wi-Fi, run about $10/month.

Here's where it gets wild. Zoom and Google Meet have both moved beyond simple captions into real-time voice-to-voice translation. You speak English, your colleague in Tokyo hears Japanese through their speakers, in a voice that mimics your actual tone and cadence.

Google Meet leads in voice cloning tech for English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese. It’s rolling out to Gemini for Workspace subscribers.

Zoom supports translated captions for 36+ languages. Their audio translation is live but the voice cloning feature is being fine-tuned to reduce the annoying 2-second lag.

Video tools like HeyGen and Panjaya go even further. They reanimate your lips to match the translated audio. Your mouth moves like you’re actually speaking the language.

The Tower of Babel is officially crumbling. And this time, no martini required. 🍸

📲 Know someone traveling abroad soon? Forward this before they end up miming “where's the bathroom” to a complete stranger in Japan.

A startup is taking deposits for the first lunar hotel opening in 2032. Price? $250K to $1M per spot. Plus, Amazon tracks every employee accomplishment for raises, a teen’s ChatGPT threat got him arrested at school and AI turned a cop into a frog in an official police report. Also, I talk to Dennis, whose daughter got hit with a deepfake scam.

Listen on Komando.com →

🎧 Or search “Komando” wherever you get your podcasts. I’m everywhere.

🏦 Elon says don’t save: In today’s dose of easy to say if you’re a billionaire, Elon Musk said retirement savings won’t matter in the AI future. Now, he’s not telling you to drain your accounts and ignore they ever existed. He’s following the plot, betting that AI, energy and robots will make everything so cheap and plentiful, retirement will simply happen. This robot utopia sounds lovely, but I’m going to go out on a hunch here. We’re not there yet, keep saving your moola.

Storage sticker shock: Tried buying a hard drive lately? Prices have spiked nearly 50% in a few months. Analysts tracked 12 popular HDDs and watched the numbers climb worldwide. The reason? AI needs storage, lots of it. Manufacturers are pivoting to enterprise gear, and the rest of us are paying the premium. Add affordable hard drives to the list of things AI ruined.

Space (traffic) Jam: Think your morning commute is rough? Looks like low Earth orbit is turning into the new gridlock capital. Elon’s pushing for 42,000 more satellites. China filed to launch over 200,000 internet satellites (You read that right) after calling out Starlink for crowding the skies. How would you feel about having at least 10,000 communist China satellites over the United States 24/7? Me too.

🏡 Scammers sold her house while she was alive: It happened to 89-year-old Dorothy Tarpin. Thieves forged a deed claiming she was dead. She didn’t find out until Medicaid cut her off for selling her home. Think that scam is hard to pull? It’s terrifyingly easy. I use Home Title Lock. It alerts me the second anyone tampers with my title. Get a free Title History Report and 14 days free right now.*

Walmart vs. Apple Pay: It's 2026 and Walmart still won't take Apple Pay, or any tap-to-pay for that matter. Why? It's all about data. Walmart wants you using their Walmart Pay so they can track your purchases for ads and marketing. Apple Pay's privacy protections make that harder. Bold strategy for a store that greets you at the door.

🚗 Mystery mileage club: Imagine dropping your car off for a brake job, then getting it back with 5,000 extra miles you can’t explain. That’s what happened in Cranberry Township, PA, where a mechanic got busted loaning out customer vehicles like free rentals. One guy even said he trusted the mechanic as a friend, until his odometer told him otherwise. It wasn’t a one‑off, either, 11 other folks found their cars treated like a Hertz. Moral? Take a mileage pic and keep an AirTag or a Tile tracker in your car.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: If your emails don’t sound quite right, paste the draft into a chatbot and prompt, “Make this more friendly (or more professional), and clean it up for clarity.” Oh, and remember to ask it not to use em dashes! You don’t want the boss thinking a robot wrote it. 😉 Sign up to get my weekly AI cheat sheet in your inbox, too, launching soon!

Android shortcuts: That side button does more than lock your screen. Open Settings > Advanced features (or Gestures) > Side button to customize it. Set a double press to open the camera or turn on the torch, and a long press to launch your digital assistant. FYI, you can also power off from Quick Settings without using buttons.

Find lost message drafts on iPhone: You ever start a text, leave the Messages app, then forget where it went? There’s no need to scroll through every thread. In Messages, long-press the Filters button in the top right. If you have unsent drafts, you’ll see Drafts in the pop-up menu. Tap it to jump back into your unfinished reply.

Windows 11 update breaks: Microsoft had to rush out an emergency fix after its Windows 11 broke two pretty fundamental things: shutting down your PC and signing in via Remote Desktop. The fix is live now. To get it: Settings > Windows Update > Check for updates. At this point, working as intended feels aspirational.

🌎 Netflix is hiding content from you: Different countries get completely different Netflix libraries. The UK has shows you can't watch. Japan has movies you'll never see. I use ExpressVPN to switch my location with one click and unlock it all. Works on your TV, laptop, tablet, PC, phone, up to 8 devices at once. Stop missing out and get 4 extra months free right now.*

Headphones used to help you ignore people. Airvida thinks you should also ignore pollution.

The T1S earbuds pair noise cancellation with a wearable ionic air purifier, basically a VIP section for your nostrils. The app tracks air quality and pollen like it’s personally offended by ragweed. The case doubles as a desktop purifier for when you want clean air while you email.

Five hours of battery. Zero hours of breathing like a peasant.

They’re coming soon. Eventually. Maybe.

Coming tomorrow: Wi-Fi 7 routers cost $600 and promise blazing-fast speeds. You probably don't need one. I'll explain why and show you how to speed up what you've got for free. Plus: a specific sound that fights Alzheimer's, and a crisis bigger than global warming. Hint: it involves french fries and ketchup.

The answer: C) Google. Since 2009, Google has outsourced its lawn care at the Mountain View HQ to a crew of 200 goats. Why? Because it’s eco-friendly, low noise and, let’s be honest, way more fun to look at through your office window than Steve from Maintenance on a ride-on mower. The goats are hired from a local farm, and they even come with their own herder and a border collie.

⛰️ Before you go: A goat, a drum and a snake fell off a cliff. Baa- dum- ssss!

💻 Remember, your brain processes faster than any computer. Trust your instincts. — Kim

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT, TORRAS, Airvida

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