Language learning company Reverso is launching a new product on the web and mobile. Reverso Synonyms is a thesaurus service that lets you learn new words and improve your vocabulary.
You may have found this feature in the main Reverso translation app already. If you translate a word or a group of words, there’s a tiny “S” button in the corner. It lets you access related words directly from the translation app.
But this was just a soft rollout, as the company is now expanding this feature into a full-fledged service. Reverso Synonyms works with a dozen languages, including English, French, Spanish…
It’s a pretty straightforward product. You can type a word and get a bunch of synonyms. You get examples and you can load the word definition for more details. You can also tap on any word to double-check the meaning.
But the service goes beyond that by offering slang translations and giving you analogies for words with multiple meanings. It also works with expressions of multiple words (“beside the point”). There will be a premium subscription with additional features.
Even more interesting than the product itself, Reverso came up with an interesting way to build a huge database in no time. Given that the company has been working for years on translation dictionaries, the company tapped this data to create a basic version of this new product.
There are 2 billion bilingual dictionary entries in Reverso Context. If two words have the same translation in multiple languages, chances are that they mean the same thing. Of course, this data has been adjusted since then with a refined algorithm and some human curation.
While Google Translate is still quite dominant in the dictionary space, Reverso manages to attract tens of millions of users every month, generating 450 million page views on the web alone. It’s an interesting startup story in a monopolistic space. While translation dictionaries will probably remain Reverso’s main product, it’s good to see some new features.
