Cove Travel

Yes — Cove Travel runs entirely offline once the model is downloaded. The first time you open the app it pulls the Google Gemma 4 E2B model file (about 2.5 GB) over Wi-Fi or mobile data. After that every translation — camera, voice, and typed text — is computed locally on your phone, with no servers in the loop. You can fly, ride a subway, hike a remote trail, or land in a country where your SIM has no roaming, and Cove will keep working exactly the same way it does at home. The app explicitly never falls back to a cloud translator when offline.

Cove Travel uses Google's Gemma 4 E2B model — an open-weight multimodal large language model that handles text, images, and audio. The same model powers all four Cove apps (Travel, Voice, Photo, Health) and is shared across them via a single on-device directory, so installing more Cove apps does not duplicate the download. We do not use Google Translate's NMT engine, OpenAI APIs, or any cloud translator. The model file is approximately 2.5 GB and you can verify its SHA-256 from the download page before installing.

Cove Travel has a free tier with 5 AI runs per day — enough to read a menu, scan a sign, and have a short conversation every day without paying. If you need more, Cove Travel Pro is a one-time purchase of $3.99 (no subscription, no monthly fee, no recurring charge). Pro removes the daily cap. There is no trial countdown, no ads, no upsell screens during translation, and no account signup required at any point. If you uninstall and reinstall, the Pro entitlement restores via Google Play's standard restore-purchases flow.

Cove Travel supports more than 30 language pairs covering the major travel destinations: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), and several others. Both directions of each pair are supported (for example English to Japanese and Japanese to English). Camera and voice translation work for all listed languages without any extra language-pack downloads — the single Gemma 4 E2B model handles every pair. We add more languages with each model update.

Yes — fully. Point your phone camera at a menu, sign, handwritten note, or product label, and Cove reads the text and translates it without any network call. Optical character recognition (OCR) and translation both happen on-device using the same Gemma 4 E2B model. There is no server-side OCR fallback. This is the main difference from Google Translate's offline mode, which downloads a smaller text-only language pack but still routes camera and live-AR features through the cloud. Cove's camera translation works identically with airplane mode on or off.

Yes — voice translation is fully offline. Tap the microphone, speak in your language, and Cove transcribes, translates, and (optionally) reads the result aloud in the target language, all on your device. Two-way conversation mode lets you and another person speak alternately and have Cove bounce between languages without any uploads. There is no per-minute cost, no streaming to a server, and no account. Background noise tolerance is good for café and street settings; very loud crowds can degrade accuracy, which is a real limit of running a model locally rather than a marketing footnote.

No. Cove Travel has no servers and no upload path for translation content. Photos, audio recordings, typed text, and translation results all stay on your phone and are processed in memory. We do not collect in-app usage analytics. The only network calls the app ever makes are: the initial model download, an optional weekly model-update check (toggleable in settings), Google Play Billing when you buy Pro, and an opt-in crash report (off by default in EU regions). None of those calls carry your translation content. The full list is published at /network-calls/ for verification.

For everyday travel tasks — menus, road signs, store labels, hotel check-in conversations, short chats — Cove Travel is close to cloud translators in quality. The Gemma 4 E2B model running on a modern phone produces fluent, idiomatic output for most short-text scenarios. Where it falls short of cloud-scale models: long technical documents, dense legal or medical text, and highly specialized jargon. Cove is engineered for the trade-off where privacy and 100% offline availability matter more than the last few percent of fluency on long-form text. For a final-draft contract translation, hire a human translator.