Cellictica, founded in 2007, is a Finnish mobile translation service provider. The mission of the company is no less ambitious than “to enable everybody to understand and speak with anybody” regardless of language barriers. The company uses partners to enable machine translation and speech synthesis technologies to provide translation services to users on mobile devices. It’s unclear to me who the partners Cellictica uses are, and what kind of business model they have together. It seems Cellictica’s competitive advantage is based on producing and distributing the combined service as a whole, while it would be nice to know what kind of agreements they have regarding the back-end technologies. Cellictica is currently going through a financing round according to recent news.
Cellictica’s translation product is called Trippo, which is a J2ME-based application. The user interface is rather simple and intuitive: you type some sentence in, press translate and you have a written and/or spoken translation. The supported languages are at the moment English, Spanish, and French, while Chinese and Arabic are on the way. At the moment translations seem only to be possible to or from English. The application uses data connection to download the translations, which allows for a huge dictionary. The service also works fast and smoothly, at least over 3G. It will require a bit longer testing to actually notice how good the quality of the dictionary is. Hearing the sentence spoken aloud on your mobile is actually really nice, a bit eery even – I could instantly think about a couple of occasions on the road when I would’ve really wanted to have this application with me .
Cellictica has been gaining good visibility this year, and was chosen recently to the Fortune list of “10 cool tools for your mobile phone“. According to rumors Cellictica is also launching soon speech recognition combined with automatic translation and speech synthesis. That would be the closest thing to the famous fish so far I guess.
You can download Trippo for free 1-day trial from http://www.trippo.mobi/.
