Private company | |
Industry | |
Founded | Long Island, New York, United States (1989 ) |
Founder | David Lubinitsky |
Headquarters | 31-21 31st Street, Long Island City, NY, USA |
Area served
|
Worldwide; United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia, Ukraine, Russia, Spain, Poland, the Czech Republic |
Key people
|
David Lubinitsky (CEO, Chairman, and Co-founder) |
Subsidiaries | LingvoSoft Co. Voice Methods LLC. Russian Silicon Valley, LLC ECTACO Developing Center |
Website | ectaco.com |
ECTACO Inc. (East-Coast Trading American Company Incorporated) is a US-based developer and manufacturer of hardware and software products for speech recognition and electronic translation. They also make jetBook eBook readers.
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, United Nations and Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), such state institutions of the USA as 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.
ECTACO was founded in 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 of other manufacturers. In 1990 ECTACO started to develop its own 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.