Tolmach

Tolmach, named after an old Russian word for an interpreter, is an Android app in two parts. The voice keyboard works in any app: you speak in your own language, and the field fills with punctuated text in the language of the person you are writing to. The Dialog screen translates a conversation between two people: each holds their own button while speaking, the phone can lie on the table, and the translation is read aloud at once.

Shared voice messages in a foreign language appear translated, with the original below. Selected text, even a whole formatted email, keeps its bold, lists and links in translation and can be answered in the other direction. Tolmach writes, translates and speaks Russian, English, Spanish, German, Czech, Vietnamese and Turkish, and understands speech in many more. Large labelled buttons and monochrome icons keep it usable for people with low vision.

The app is written in Kotlin without a single third-party library. Recognition (Whisper), translation (TranslateGemma), dictation clean-up (Qwen3) and speech synthesis (MOSS-TTS) run on our own GPU servers through vLLM rather than cloud APIs; conversations stay on the phone, and the server does not keep speech. Spoken translations are streamed and start playing before synthesis is finished. Perlover Traffic also runs the service and provides its technical and software support.