A couple from Goa has come up with a technology to enable Indians to type in their own languages on keypads and make typing hassle-free and convenient. Spare a few minutes to know more about the effort.
A commendable step
Svayu IT Private Ltd, a company founded by Goa-based Ashish Asgekar is doing a commendable job. It has been focusing on an important gap that exists today.
“Indic scripts are not well supported in the digital sphere. It is a hassle to create text content, and to use digital services in one’s own script without using Roman (QWERTY) keyboard,” says Ashish.
“We currently offer Lipee Devnagari Keyboard, which speeds up typing in Devnagari by 100%. Lipee supports Marathi and Hindi and has more than 200,000 downloads. The keyboard is free, and we aim to serve millions of Indian users.”
How it’s helpful
“Our technologies will help Indians living in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. People are mostly not much educated and aspire to avail digital services to improve their lives. For example, farmers or women entrepreneurs want to trade in their own language, and young adults may want to access social media in their own script. We hope to serve this demographic,” said Mahalaxmi Bhobe, the co-founder of the start-up adding that soon keyboards would roll in other languages also.
The beginning
“Most Indians do not read or write in English, but know their mother-tongue and most are more comfortable writing in their own script. Mobile digital technologies are focused on English or other European languages. Indians, therefore, mostly need to use mobiles in Roman scripts and learn to operate using English,” said Ashish.
“This is especially true when one needs to create content in Indic scripts and languages. Our experience taught us that typing using Indic scripts was hard on mobiles. The existing solutions are clumsy and non-intuitive, with limited keyboard solutions for Indic scripts available. Since we did not have a choice, we decided to find a solution ourselves. Svayu was started by us to offer technology to Indians, either in the mobile sphere or elsewhere.”
Background of the founders
Ashish Asgekar is an applied scientist, with a doctorate in Astrophysics from Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. He has an established track record of working with highly competitive teams in Europe and India.
The co-founder, Mahalaxmi Bhobe is a highly experienced social worker, education researcher and counsellor. She graduated from TISS (Mumbai) with MA (Social Work), and is currently researching on vocational education. The couple together started Svayu in 2017 to focus on Indic scripts and languages.
Vision
The company believes that every Indian should be able to access the internet in his/her mother tongue and script of his/her choice. “Indian language content on the free internet is very limited, and we would like to change this scenario,” Mahalaxmi said.
Current position
The App is online for 20 months and currently there have been 200,000 downloads. Ashish expects to take this figure to one million by the end of this year.
How to download
Here the links given to download the Lipee keyboard:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.svayu.lipi
Promo video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-sqaD9Tnt0
Get in touch
Ashish Asgekar
https://www.linkedin.com/in/svayu/
svayu@svayu.in
ashish@svayu.in
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