IIT Bombay students launch Scanning Apps
Aug 30, 2020
Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], Aug 31 : Taking inspiration from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's clarion call for an Atma Nirbhar Bharat, two final year B.Tech students pursuing Civil Engineering at IIT Bombay, launched AIR Scanner, a free-of-cost document-scanning mobile application.
The AI (Artificial Intelligence) based Reading Assistant and Document Scanner app is developed by Rohit Kumar Chaudhary and Kavin Agrawal, both students of IIT Bombay.
According to a Press Information Bureau (PIB) release issued on Sunday, the app was launched on August 15, as an indigenous alternative to ban Chinese counterpart.
"Initially, we had been working on developing an app to make the reading experience easy for people who find it difficult to read English. It was then that the Indian government banned many Chinese apps including mobile scanner apps," said Chaudhary, one of the developers.
He added that after the ban on the Chinese app called CamScanner, both the developers surveyed and found that people are facing issues in scanning and organising documents through their mobile phones.
"It was then we decided to add scanning features too to our existing AIR App," Chaudhary added.
As per Chaudhary, what makes his app special are its exclusive safety features.
"AIR Scanner app does not collect any information about the user and all the documents are stored in the phone's local storage. We are not using any cloud storage to store the documents of the users. The app guarantees complete user security," he said.
According to the release, the document scanned using a mobile camera will be saved in PDF format and will be stored in the device only.
Talking about the motivation behind the innovation, Chaudhary said he wanted to help people in education.
"As of now, it is available in the 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.Soon we are planning to convert this project into a Start-Up," he said.
Chaudhary added that currently the app is available for Android users only but soon it will be released for iOS users too.
