By Raju Vernekar
Mumbai, August 29:
As a sequel to the ban on various Chinese applications including Cam Scanner, by the Government of India, the team of final year undergraduate students of IIT Bombay have developed AIR Scanner, an Artificial Intelligence(AI)-based Reading Assistant and Document Scanner application.
Motivated by the Prime Minister’s vision of “Atmanirbhar Bharat” (self reliant India), the students have built a Made-In India “EdTech” product which has some powerful and unique features. In future, it can be a strong competition to many existing non-Indian applications such as Adobe Scan and CamScanner. This application could prove to be fruitful to various people involved in online education and work from home amid this pandemic outbreak. Thus students and officials both can use it for their benefit. It includes all the ideal Document Scanner features such as scanning, organizing and sharing documents.
Considering the lockdown situation, students are completing all academic processes, admission procedures and regular learning via online mode. The app aims to help students to scan, organise and share documents. In addition, the AI Reading assistant is powered by AI technology which understands words in a page. With a single tap on word boxes, the user gets its full-fledged meaning including examples, synonyms, pronunciation and translation in more than 40 languages.
As called the AI Reading assistant, it is powered by AI technology which understands words in a page and just a single tap on word boxes can provide the user with its meaning, related examples, synonyms, pronunciation details and translation in more than forty languages. One can import his/her Ebooks or capture newspaper snippets with the AI Narrator reading it aloud.
The students who have developed the AIR Scanner App have been working on developing the AI Reading Assistant app for a long time. It was when various Chinese apps were banned, they surveyed and realized that people were facing difficulties in scanning, organizing and sharing documents. So they utilized their expertise in application development and built a Document Scanner App that was packed with powerful AI Reading Assistant feature and named it AIR Scanner.
The Cam Scanner was formally launched on “Playstore at undefined://bit.ly/air_iitb&source=gmail&ust=1598765134545000&usg=AFQjCNEiSN7YFTFHJofwj0Vy4KkpiZasug”>bit.ly/air_iitb on Independence Day. The app can also be used to import ebooks or capture newspaper snippets, and the AI narrator can read it out loud.
The students, Rohit Kumar Chaudhary and Kavin Agrawal, were working on the development of an AI reading assistant app for a long time. But when the central government banned several Chinese apps including CamScanner, they surveyed and realised that majority of the people were facing difficulties in scanning, organising and sharing documents.
“The AI reading assistant has two significant features— a dictionary and a narrator,” said Chaudhary. With a single tap on word boxes, the user gets its full-fledged meaning including examples, synonyms, pronunciation and translation in over 40 languages. Users can also import e-books and newspaper snippets and have the mobile application read it aloud to them. “Currently the app supports only English language for assisted reading. But soon we will be rolling out an update that will support Hindi and other local languages,” Chaudhary added.
The developers are mulling filing a patent for the technology. Meanwhile, the institute claimed that the application would give stiff competition to existing document scanning applications.
