Trippo the perfect translation tool - at a price
Published by Steve Litchfield at 12:02 UTC, March 31st 2008
Trippo popped its head above the software parapet a few days ago when it got added to Nokia's Download! service for the N95 8GB. But it's available to all and is in the AAS software shop. The big question is, can it live up to its claims? Ewan's been reviewing Trippo and both he and I were gobsmacked at how good the service is - and also at how expensive it might work out.
"Trippo is a small Java application that
yet again proves you can replace a lot of books, guides and maps with just your
smartphone when you go abroad on holiday or on a business trip.
I was initially surprised by the very small
size of the application - only 197K - which seems rather small for a
translation application. Have they discovered some mysterious compression
technology? No it's simpler than that. Trippo is a client-server based system.
When you enter the text you want parsed, Trippo will connect to a central
server (I'm assuming with a very big database and far more computational
power) and return the translated phrase on-screen for you."
Read on
News Discussion
nipul pravin
Ewan, although it is a nice application to have in my arsenal, trippo is not a complete package. you see it can translate and can also speak out but what do you do when someone replies in that same language. asking question in different language with the help of n95 is good but trippo does not offer a recording option to translate it for us if the person answers in same language.
jrmt
Arcade
Babelfish is another great translation program that uses a client-server method. It doesnt support voice playback but it is for free..
aragornsbeared
I use Fring on my n95, combined with the Google Talk translate bots. Very little traffic required and they're pretty fast. Clearly it doesn't get round the pronunciation, but generally it's all about getting the words quick rather than sounding exactly like a native.
Kimmo
Hi Ewan, Steve and others,
You are right with our architecture. The reason behind this choice is simple: We decided to use the best possible technologies for speech and language translation, and we need to use very heavy servers for the service. We use sw with 100s of GB size and this we can never do in any handset.
The problem is the mentioned data transfer costs. This we hope to improve in time when the market gets matured.
Thank you all for your valuable input. But for example regarding to pricing, we need to cover the costs and our quality can be freely compared with any competition on earth. We hope that people will agree to pay for a value added service.
Kind regards,
Kimmo@cellictica.comFull thread: 5 Comments / Post New Comment