Here comes the original and native alternative to the Chinese document-scanning app post the Indian government’s decision to prohibit or ban 59 mobiles apps that were against the integrity of the nation.
About the app
Dubbed as AIR Scanner—the app developed by Rohit Kumar Chaudhary and Kavin Agrawal, final year B. Tech students at IIT-Bombay, India—is available free-of-cost. Launched on the occasion of the Indian Independence day, the app can read to users facing difficulty in reading English.
The idea behind
Rohit Kumar Chaudhary, one of the developers of the app, said that the two had been working on building an app to ease the reading experience for people who were not familiar with English. Also, during that period, the government imposed a ban on several Chinese apps, including mobile scanners.
Post the government ban on CamScanner, the Chinese app, the duo surveyed and discovered that scanning and organizing documents through mobile devices was a concern for many.
Post which the duo decided to add a scanning feature to their existing AIR app.
USP of the app
Here are answers to what makes this app special. Does it have exclusive safety features?
Yes.
Documents scanned on the AIR app using the mobile camera get saved in a PDF format in the device.
The indigenous app does not collect any information related to the user, and all the documents are stored on the mobile device’s local storage.
On the security front, Rohit (one of the developers) explains, “We are not using any cloud storage to store the documents of the users. The application guarantees complete user security.”
What is different about the AIR app?
Rohit stated, “Many scanner apps require users to sign-in to their apps. Once you sign-in to the application, they automatically back-up all your documents and your personal information into their cloud.”
“This is where the security issue arises. AIR Scanner app doesn’t even require you to sign-in,” he added.
With the AIR app, every user can conveniently scan, organize, and share documents at ease without worrying about security.
Additionally, this app makes use of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) feature that reads out scanned pages and also provides the meaning of the selected word in 40 different languages.
Rohit further stated, “The motivation behind this innovation is to help people in education.”
He adds, “As of now, it is available in English language only, but we are planning to make it available in multiple languages, which will make it easy for anyone to read any language.”
Road ahead
The duo plans to transform this project into a start-up.
As per data, the app currently has 1,500 downloads from the Play Store and is available for Android users only, and it will soon be engineered for iOS too.
To download this app, click on the link below –
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hind.airscanner