Trippo Mondo- Voice Translator

Summary

 I have yet to have come across a voice translator app on the Android Market. I have seen the occasional online translator program that can read words and sentences around, but according to its market description Trippo offers much more than that:

Trippo translates any given phrase and speaks it out with local language. More than 30 languages supported. Never again language problems, wherever you travel!

The speech feature is not an add-on, but rather the main feature of Trippo. The app’s market description may be a bit deceiving since not all languages have equal speech support. When translating from English, for example, more languages have a text-to-speech function than when translating from German. In general, the text-to-speech function is a bit better than your regular TTS engine. The spoken English is easy to understand, which cannot be said about French or German. Sometimes single words are more comprehensible than full sentences. The translation is done online so that the voices heard are actually real. The quality of the voices, however, is not exactly great.

As far as the actual written translation is concerned, Trippo does a fairly good job. Individual words as well as short phrases were translated correctly for the most part. Obviously, I couldn’t test all the languages but the results were satisfactory with French, German, Russian and Polish.
Trippo can be helpful, but doesn’t quite live up to its over-the-top market description. Three stars is as much as this app deserves.

Trippo’s controls are about as simple as it gets. Select a language from a list on the top and then do the same for the language you would like to translate to. Finally, you can enter a sentence or word into a text box. Using the Translate and Speak buttons you can start the translating process. The translation results are read and/or displayed to you at the bottom of the screen. You can forward your translation (via SMS, Twitter or Email) by clicking on the envelope icon.

By pressing the menu button, you can access a Help section and adjust the voice speed in the settings.

Bottom Line:

Trippo controls are limited to the bare minimum, but work really well. Trippo’s simple design made a good impression on me.

Trippo ran smoothly on both the Milestone and the G1. The audio files take longer to load when using GPRS rather than Wi-Fi. 

Trippo can be downloaded for free from the Android Market.