Lingmo International, a startup based in West Gosford north of Sydney, launched its TranslateOne2One earpiece at the UN's Artificial Intelligence for Good Summit in Geneva, revealing that IBM Watson machine learning technology had been used for its algorithms.

Traditionally, converting one language to another orally in real-time is called "interpreting" whereas the term "translation" is reserved for processing text across languages with some delay. Lingmo founder Danny May, however, describes his product as performing "translation in real-time".

"It's a fully independent translation earpiece. And what I mean by independent is that it doesn't require any connectivity to your phone by Bluetooth or wi-fi. A lot of our competitors do," he told Business Insider.

TranslateOne2One can handle English (US and UK), Japanese, French, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German and Portuguese.