Undoubtedly, Covid-19 has been hard on all of us. But the pandemic and the lockdowns have been exceptionally excruciating for people with physical challenges. While most people are staying at home, turning to digital means for work and leisure, people with special needs tend to be left out, especially the visually challenged. Khabri, which claims to be India’s first digital audio content platform in a local language, offers a solution here. It has rolled out an exclusive helpline portal and platform to cater to the needs of the visually-challenged in the country during Covid-19.

“Privileged people can ensure compliance with social distancing, but the visually-impaired are facing challenges – social, medical or psychological. Our helpline portal tries to address their problems,” says Sandeep Singh, President and Co-founder, Khabri. “Besides this, we are also planning to hold live sessions with experts for direct interaction and make sure that the community of blind and visually-impaired is not left behind.” Khabri is also launching a dedicated content channel, live counselling session and a celebrity-led talk show to help the blind community across India.

Launched in October 2017, Khabri was founded by three partners: Pulkit Sharma, Ankit Roy and Sandeep Singh taking inspiration from Prime Minister Modi’s ‘Start-up India’ campaign. To offer users more choices, a set of editors curate content throughout the day. Khabri’s social responsibility initiative is in sync with its business. A content creation platform, it enables people to create audio content on the fly. “It is an open platform and currently is in Hindi, but very soon we will support multiple local languages,” says Singh. Khabri has content in all popular categories, stories, profiles, motivational work, personality development, and so on.

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Posting content on Khabri is simple. You create a profile and then download the app, Khabri Studio, which will help you create and post your content on Khabri. It will also give you the analytics data, of how many people your stories have reached and how many people have shared it, and all the engagement metrics you need. “Khabri is the consumer-facing app, and Khabri Studio is for the content creators,” says Singh.

Khabri compensates the creators via an incentive programme. “They are helping us build a community around the channels. So there is a business,” says Singh. “We have given different slabs here: if you have 100 followers, you get qualified for a certain slab; the more the merrier.” The numbers you accumulate will be converted into points based on the points you get cash rewards.

Is enabling everyone to create and post content on Khabri a problem?

An AI-powered moderator filters out explicit or inappropriate content or design.

Is that enough, especially in vernacular languages where machine intelligence has been pretty poor in India? Singh says it is a matter of applying more intelligence into the AI and the rewards system will also help ensure and enhance quality.

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