VocaBoca Visual Translator wins the International Create Challenge 2012

Sept. 26, 2012 - PRLog -- Geneva, Switzerland -  VocaBoca won Idiap’s International Create Challenge 2012. During three weeks the VocaBoca team competed against 11 other teams in Martigny, Switzerland, to win the 10.000 USD prize and access to “The Ark” incubator.

VocaBoca is a mobile app for Android that combines the power of the best available technologies to explain any word in almost any language. For example, students can take a picture of any object and the app will tell them what the object is in 10 to 60 seconds. It will also show a translation, images, as well as dictionary and encyclopedia definitions.

New words can be tagged and saved to different vocabulary lists for future study. Automatic language detection, speech recognition, text-to-speech capabilities and a copy service that allows users to add new words from any other app complete Vocaboca's offering.

"VocaBoca helps you to learn languages in everyday situation; users can learn new words when they read the news, when they talk to their friends and even when they check their e-mail” says Javier Sierra, VocaBoca’s co-founder, who uses the app to improve his French.

Pricing and Availability:

The first two visual translations are FREE and users can either buy more or get them for FREE by performing actions such as downloading apps, watching videos or liking brands in facebook. An iPhone version is in progress, interested users can sign up at vocaboca.com

Device requirements: Android OS 2.2

Download Link

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vocaboca

VocaBoca was developed by JEA Ventures, a recently created independent mobile development company with three team members located in Switzerland and Spain. It has released two Android apps to the market: VocaBoca, (www.vocaboca.com) and noneed2call (www.noneed2call.com).

About Idiap

The Idiap Research Institute is an independent, nonprofit, research foundation affiliated with Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Its activities encompass basic research and development in the areas of multimedia information management, perceptual and cognitive systems, social media, biometric person recognition, multimodal information interfaces, and large scale machine learning.