Speereo Voice Translator

[Janak Parekh]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.speereo.com/Products/vtrans.html' target='_blank'>http://www.speereo.com/Products/vtrans.html</a><br /><br /></div>This looks like a very cool and potentially useful program. Has anyone tried it? The current version supports English to a variety of languages, including Spanish, German, French, Italian and Russian.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/parekh-20030715-Speereo-translator.gif" /><br /><br />"With Voice Translator, you say a phrase in English and it gets immediately translated and articulated in the language of your interlocutor. About 2,000 most commonly used words, business, technical, medical, and legal terms, conversational phrases, idioms, and some slang are arranged in 16 main categories and 87 sub-categories by subject, such as Travel, Useful, City, Buy food, Shopping, Health and Entertainment."

[msprague]

Maybe your front page post will get more of a response than my post. (http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=14916)

[droppedd]

Heheh until voice recognition gets to 99.9% accuracy, i'll avoid using this in foreign countries. Sounds like a scene from a comedy of errors - voice recognition system mis-hears when you say "Take me to the hotel" and insults your cab driver's mother in Spanish, and you wouldn't have a clue, not speaking the language. And then you wonder why you wake up in a bathtub full of ice minus one kidney. :lol:

[JoshB]

I beta tested this app. The voice recognition was OK - it didn't work very well if there was much noise in the room, but that's to be expected. You can always pick your phrase from the UI on the screen, rather than speaking it. I found the quality of the text-to-foreign-language-speech to be pretty good. The Spanish pronunciation was pretty passable, for a text-to-speech app. I can't judge the quality of the other languages, because I don't speak them very well myself. :D

The UI seemed a little busy, and would benefit from a new skin IMO, but other than that, it's a pretty neat little app. I had it installed to my storage card (the language files are a couple of meg), and it worked just fine.

If I were travelling in Europe, or anywhere else where I didn't speak the language, I'd want this app installed on my Pocket PC, just in case. I wouldn't use it for day-to-day interactions (kind of clumsy for that), but I can definitely see how it would be useful in a pinch.

JoshB

[JoshB]

The current version supports English-to-Spanish.
Janek:

The app actually supports Spanish, German, French, Italian and Russian (according to their website and my experience with it).

JoshB

[Eitel]

Darn, who did the spanish translations? A 5th grade spanish student? :lol:

[Janak Parekh]

The app actually supports Spanish, German, French, Italian and Russian (according to their website and my experience with it).
Thanks; I corrected the post. I had seen a PR that only cited Spanish.

--janak

[speereosoftware]

Just to keep the thread up to date:
Current version - 4.0.
1. The talking phrasebook that provides translation between 16 languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Russian, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Turkish, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, formal Arabic, Finnish, Polish, Danish.
2. Additional services: Online Flight Timetable and Flight Status, Online World Weather, Columbus Travel Guides, Size & Measure Converter.
3. Platforms: Windows Mobile, Symbian, Java.
4. Awards: Pocket PC Magazine's Best Software Awards Finalist 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 (Category - Multilingual Dictionaries); Handster's Best Software Awards Winner 2008 (Category - Travel).
5. Price range: USD 10-40 depending on platform.
Product page @ Speereo Voice Translator (http://www.speereovt.com)