Kolkata undergrads develop utility app SnapLingo to make daily life easy

Ankita De, Prajata Samanta and Sourajit Basu just made life easy for people around them by coming up with SnapLingo, an app that takes care of everything from document scanning and editing, creating password-protected PDFs to scanning and generating QR codes. 

Tackling the complexities of the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) world, the three third-year students from the Institute of Engineering and Management (IEM) started work on SnapLingo soon after the government imposed a ban on Chinese apps. On coming to know of such a significant development, ABP Education caught up with these effervescent minds to know the journey of putting SnapLingo together.

According to Ankita, this application is of great utility to all professionals, including students and educators. “The application has a feature to extract the texts from the image files. If the document has an address, the application has a feature to locate the address as well. Additionally, there is an added feature to translate the document. The entire application with all these necessary features are within a very limited size of 20 MB, unlike other large-sized apps,” she said. Officially launched on July 20, the application has already received fairly impressive feedback.

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Started as a sideline project in the first year of college, Sourajit explained that their plans finally gathered momentum when the government announced a sweeping ban on Chinese applications. Stressing on expanding the ecosystem of Indian developers, he said, “India has talented and skilled developers with limited technical and logistic support which make the development of applications challenging. People are coerced to turn to Chinese or American Apps or applications made by other foreign countries and that apparently, mop the entire Indian market. It’s time that we start structuring our own products.” 

Prajata revealed that the team has plans to take the app to the next level by adding more useful features. And in a message to aspiring developers, he said one should always experiment before implementation.

“Experimentation is the decisive constituent to develop confidence which will further assist someone in application development,” he explained.