Inspired by the powerful message for an Atma Nirbhar Bharat from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, two final year B.Tech students pursuing Civil Engineering at IIT Bombay launched AIR Scanner, a free-of-cost mobile application for document scanning.
The Reading Assistant and Document Scanner application, based on AI ( Artificial Intelligence), is created by Rohit Kumar Chaudhary and Kavin Agrawal, both IIT Bombay students.
The app was released on August 15, as shown in a press information bureau (PIB) release issued on Sunday, as an indigenous alternative to banning Chinese counterparts.
“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,” says Chaudhary.
He stated that both developers researched after the ban on the Chinese app called CamScanner, and found that people face issues in scanning and organizing documents through their mobile phones.
“It was then we decided to add scanning features too to our existing AIR App,” Chaudhary added.
Apps safety features make the app unique
“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 added
The document scanned using a mobile camera will be saved in PDF format according to the release, and will only be stored in the memory.
Speaking of the idea behind the concept, Chaudhary said he decided to provide help for educators.
“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 stated that the app is currently available to Android users but will soon be available for iOS users as well.
