Remember, how the radio and transistor were prized possessions for Indians a few decades ago in the cities, small towns, and in rural areas? A pocket transistor was invariably a companion while people worked—on the fields, in mills, drove a tractor or cycled to their destination. 

The country’s culture of consuming information or being entertained was primarily audio before the advent of television. Now it is seeing a resurrection in the form of podcasts, audiobooks, audio messaging, and other audio-based online entertainment. In fact, it is estimated that audio content has seen a 34 per cent rise in these times of the pandemic. 

Riding on this audio culture is the app Khabri, which has in the last three years penetrated the Hindi heartland, especially tier 2 and tier 3 cities and villages. Khabri is more than just an app. It is a one-stop audio repository for consumers and creators alike. It provides interactive content which does more than entertain. It brings to its subscribers a host of educational courses and exam-oriented material which help in preparing them for a variety of government recruitment exams like those conducted by banks, defence services, railways among others. 

The subscribers of the app can consume information while on the go. “It’s more easily accessible than both video and the written word. You don’t have to sit in one place to watch it or read it,” observes Dushyant Kohli, co-founder and chief operating officer of Khabri. 

It only requires an entry level smart phone to get on board. The app currently has four offerings—news, government job preparation, motivational content, and the knowledge vertical, which will provide audio courses with live interactive sessions with teachers and content from well-known local tutorial companies. The app also enables professionals to create audio content through an audio creator just like YouTube does in a video format. 

In the jobs section, the app periodically lists all the government jobs that are vacant and hosts interactive sessions to help you fill out the application forms.

So, what tech features does the app use to execute such diverse offerings? Aankit Roy, co-founder and chief technical officer at Khabri explains that a key challenge for building products for the rural and tier 2-3 cities is slower internet connections. Hence Khabri has optimised their tech stack to deliver high quality services in these regions with minimal latency and friction. Voice synthesis, machine learning and artificial intelligence are also used to process a range of dialects, given the linguistic diversity of rural India. 

Right now, Khabri is available in MP, UP, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Uttarakhand, and Bihar, but will soon add more languages and geographies.

Roy emphasises on some of the features that Khabri currently offers including “audio processing by adding background music, trimming, compression to smooth content creation, and upload through the Khabri Studio App.” He says that on the consumption side, users are able to select play/ pause/ next/ previous buttons from the notification itself in order to provide a flawless experience. 

Though Khabri is going in for monetisation of their audio courses and professional sessions through payment gateways and other payment options, Kohli assures that there will be no advertisements to disturb the users’ experience. “We are in the knowledge market,” he says. 

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