Students of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT Bombay) have developed an app called the AIR Scanner which is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based reading assistant and document scanner. Rohit Kumar Chaudhary and Kavin Agrawal, final year graduates of the institute have developed this app as a made-in-India edtech product with unique features which can compete against the existing non-Indian apps like Adobe Scan and CamScanner.
Considering the lockdown situation in view of the Covid-19 pandemic, 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.
The app can also be used to import ebooks or capture newspaper snippets, and the AI narrator can read it out loud. Chaudhary and 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.
