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In the blink of an eye, the seven-day presale period ended.
"Across the entire presale, the Hermes-1 translation machine sold one thousand two hundred units, and the Hermes earbuds ten thousand pairs. Total goods value just broke ten million."
"If Swiftvox and the rest hadn't run their discount ambush, it might have climbed a little higher. But the ceiling was always sitting right there. However much higher, it wouldn't have been much."
Ryan's father laid out the presale results over dinner.
For Prism, a result like this was miserable to the extreme, and it fell nowhere near what people had expected.
Bear in mind that the New Year edition of the Crimson Typhoon models, produced with Prism's manufacturing partners, had opened its own global presale one day earlier.
In under a single day, the presale goods value had broken an astonishing eight hundred million.
The comparison had plenty of people declaring that Prism should simply concentrate on making toys from now on. Why bother researching anything else?
Set against that, a translation-device business that took seven whole days of presale to break ten million, and was still trending downward, looked like it had no value at all.
And yet Ryan, his father, and Prism's senior leadership found the translation numbers perfectly acceptable.
At the current pace, the translation-machine business would lose little even if it lost, and might even eke out a small profit, quietly transfusing blood back into the AI translation group.
At this point, Ryan's mother carried the last dishes out of the kitchen. The table filled with color and fragrance, and the smell of the food settled warmly over everything.
She switched off the living room television in passing, where a Redcliff Islands tourism advertisement was still playing, sat down at the table, and said, "The way I see it, with the Hermes machine selling this badly, don't increase production. The current stock will last a very long time. From here on, our translation devices should center on the Hermes earbuds."
Ryan's father shook his head. "That's where you don't understand. I haven't given up on the translation machine at all, whatever they're saying outside. We've still got a big move coming."
Ryan's mother rolled her eyes. "Whatever your big move is, it won't change the product's nature. Its place among translation devices is the same as those brick phones from thirty years ago. Sooner or later, it gets eliminated."
"The best carrier for translation, going forward, is the interpretation earbud."
"With how precisely the Hermes earbuds pick up the human voice, we only need to add a call mode that isolates the wearer's own voice, and the call quality will jump a whole level."
"Then our earbuds can compete on genuine differentiation. Against other interpretation earbuds, Hermes beats them on every specification. Against ordinary wireless earbuds, Hermes carries a simultaneous interpretation function they don't have, and it holds its own on sound quality and call quality besides."
Ryan's mother spoke with easy fluency. She was no simple homemaker.
And it was exactly as she said. The Hermes earbuds' sound staging was superb, and by necessity. The earbuds had to translate several people's voices at once and feed the translations back to the wearer in distinct layers.
If the layering weren't crisp, then the moment many people around you spoke foreign languages, the translated audio in your ear would run together into a single lump of paste, impossible to tell apart.
Ryan's father lifted his bowl, shoveled in a few mouthfuls, and said, "There's sense in that. On the level of technology and practicality, a device like the translation machine is going to be eliminated sooner or later. The only question is how fast."
With that, he turned to Ryan. "Ryan, going by the current trend, how much longer do you think the translation machine survives on the market?"
Ryan's chopsticks didn't pause. He was savoring his mother's long-missed cooking as he answered. "The way I see it, there's no need for a Hermes-3. Once we finish inter-translation across the world's languages, the earbuds replace the machine very quickly."
"How so?" His father set down his chopsticks and listened carefully to his son's analysis.
"It's a simple thing. If we complete inter-translation among the world's major languages, then a German puts on our earbuds and hears everything in German. A Frenchman, the same. Once every mainstream language translates into every other, then in the tourism market, the Hermes earbuds stop being confined to the tourists." Ryan said it almost carelessly, between bites.
His father was a clever man, and he grasped the implication at once.
"You're saying that, when the time comes, everyone in the tourism industry puts on our earbuds? Everyone becomes our customer?"
His mind was spinning fast now. "In every major tourist city, the merchants providing the services and the travelers enjoying them, supply and demand both, all wearing our earbuds. And then we've become the communication platform standing between the two sides!"
The translation needs of the tourism supply side were a market no one had ever seriously opened up. If things could be brought to the point Ryan described, Prism would be the only player in it.
"That's right." Ryan nodded.
"But to get there, we'll need to add new language-training programs to Argus Translate."
Training an AI translation model required enormous volumes of parallel text as its dataset.
Domestic firms like Swiftvox used corpora of at least a hundred million sentence pairs and up for the flagship language pairing alone.
For minor languages, the corpora had to be commissioned or collected from scratch, at costs counted in the tens of millions.
So the cost of the worldwide inter-translation he was describing stood in the road like a tiger.
Even granting that Argus needed far less data than other models, reaching full inter-translation between any two languages would probably still start at two or three million per pairing.
To Ryan's father, though, cost on that scale was no obstacle whatsoever.
"Add them!" he declared, expansive. "German, French, whatever they are, line them all up!"
Watching his father's excitement, Ryan only shook his head, ladled himself a bowl of soup, glanced at his mother's face, and began a silent countdown.
Three.
Two.
One.
"Eat your dinner properly!" His mother shot an impatient glare at the still-glowing head of the household, and then her gaze dropped meaningfully to his bowl.
His father shuddered. The excitement vanished from his face on the spot, and he picked up his bowl in silence and ate like an honest man.
Ryan took a slow, appreciative sip of the soup. "Mom, your soup is genuinely delicious."
"Mm! My son's the good one."
After the presale ended, the Hermes machines and earbuds were shipped out to their buyers at speed.
As expected, they harvested a flood of glowing reviews, above all for the translation precision, and for the earbuds most of all.
It was only that the good reviews did very little for sales. The Hermes translation machine went on looking half-dead.
Which let Swiftvox and the others release, for the moment, a long-held breath.
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EXTRA CHAPTER FOR EVERY 500 POWERSTONES.