IIT Bombay students develop alternative to Chinese scanning app

IIT Bombay students have developed Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Reading Assistant and Document Scanner app, as an indigenous alternative to banned Chinese counterpart.

Indian Institute of Technology has announced that two of its final year BTech students pursuing Civil Engineering has launched a free-of-cost document-scanning mobile application. They have named it AIR Scanner. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Reading Assistant and Document Scanner app is developed by Rohit Kumar Chaudhary and Kavin Agrawal, both students of IIT Bombay.

As per the release issued by Press Information Bureau (PIB), the application 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.

"After the ban on the Chinese app called CamScanner, we 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.

When asked about the motivation behind the development, he said that they wanted to help students and others to scan their documents without facing any hurdle.

“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.

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