(Late May update: Firefox screen word capture is now supported!)
On May 8, Kingsoft and Google, the world’s largest search engine company, jointly held a press conference at the Avic Hotel in Beijing to announce the official release of their co-branded product, Google PowerWord.
http://cp.iciba.com/news/2008/05/08/120894.shtml
Downloads are already available online.
http://download.iciba.com/pwl/powerwordlite.25269.3008.exe
PowerWord’s size has shrunk from over 300 MB to just over 20 MB! This makes downloads easier for users while saving disk space. PowerWord users will also get timely access to a rich vocabulary sourced from the internet.
Google PowerWord has three major features:
- Free
- Internet-based
- Innovative machine translation technology
The most important point is that this release of Google PowerWord is the first completely free version in PowerWord’s twelve-year history, the first co-branded product in the PowerWord line, and one of its most important releases. It bundles features like article and web page translation. Most importantly, its release marks PowerWord’s complete transformation into an “internet” product.
Google PowerWord’s three core features are free software, internet integration, and innovative machine translation technology. It markets itself on a comprehensive, ten-in-one feature set covering most of what today’s translation software can do, including full-text translation, whole-sentence translation, and web page translation — all offered for the first time in twelve years. This version retains Kingsoft’s existing powerful resources while also embedding Google’s leading internet strengths and machine translation support, achieving better coverage of the latest vocabulary and slang along with full-text translation. By comparing and matching massive volumes of multilingual documents across the internet, it delivers accurate results quickly and conveniently.
Google PowerWord is the crystallization of a powerful alliance between the two companies’ strengths. Flying the banner of free software, it abandons its formerly huge size and is built on web interaction, coming in at a mere 20-plus MB. Yet while keeping its size slim, it inherits the speed and convenience of a local dictionary, delivering the best possible user experience. Google PowerWord will offer 14 million entries, 800,000 example sentences, and 300,000 human-recorded pronunciations.
GOOGLE VS BAIDU — Thanks to PowerWord’s massive user base, Google will leverage that to compete for market share against localization giant Baidu. Interestingly, Baidu had previously partnered with Kingsoft Antivirus in the online antivirus space. Clearly, the two search engine companies’ battle for users is only intensifying.
I gave it a try, and this thing is really great. Lightweight yet powerful, it uses around 15 MB of memory. Highly recommended! Download Google PowerWord.