Ectaco

ECTACO was founded in the autumn of 1989 in New York, USA, by David Lubinitsky, who was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The company was functioning at that time mainly as a reseller of electronic dictionaries from other manufacturers. In 1990 ECTACO started to develop its hardware and software. Russian- and Polish-speaking immigrants in the USA became the primary commercial target group for the products of the company. The first electronic dictionaries of ECTACO supported translation between Russian ↔ English, Polish ↔ English and later German ↔ English language pairs.

Speech recognition technologies

ECTACO is one of the first developers of speech recognition technologies in the field of electronic translation. The speech recognition technologies developed by ECTACO in cooperation with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are used by such international organizations as NATO, the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), such state institutions of the US as the United States Army, FBI, United States Department of Homeland Security, Social Security Administration, United States Secret Service, Department of Health Services, United States Postal Service, New York Hospitals etc. The cooperation with US institutions was especially active in 2004–2006. ECTACO devices were also used in the War in Iraq.

The speech recognition system developed by ECTACO allowed troops as well as other US governmental institutions to communicate with non-English-speaking communities, especially in conflict regions. The technology made it possible to translate not only the outgoing message but the incoming one as well, with no dependence of the quality of the translation on the speech particularities of an individual speaker – a service not provided by other companies in the segment of the time.

Brands

Ectaco has several brands which it uses to break its products into categories.

iTravl - is aimed at travelers and features multiple languages and speech recognition.