The beta version of Arattai, which means to chit-chat in Tamil, was launched last week after Zoho employees began looking for alternatives to the world’s largest messaging service.
Elevate Your Tech Prowess with High-Value Skill Courses
Offering College | Course | Website |
---|---|---|
IIM Lucknow | IIML Executive Programme in FinTech, Banking & Applied Risk Management | Visit |
IIT Delhi | IITD Certificate Programme in Data Science & Machine Learning | Visit |
Indian School of Business | ISB Professional Certificate in Product Management | Visit |
“You will see voice and video capabilities (in Arattai), which have taken about 8-10 years of R&D that went into various products that we built…. Arattai itself comes from our Cliq platform, which is an enterprise messaging platform,” Sridhar Vembu, founder and the chief executive officer of Zoho Corporation, said at a virtual Nasscom product conclave Monday. “We are repurposing a lot of the techn towards a faster scale consumer-class product.”
Cliq competes with workplace chatrooms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Zoho set out to build a messaging app at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Praval Singh, vice president (marketing and customer experience) at the Chennai-based SaaS startup, said at the Nasscom conclave. “We're looking at Arattai being more than just a cross-platform, secure messaging application. We're building it as a utility that can help you with multiple things in your daily life, with communication at the core of it.”
Discover the stories of your interest
Arattai’s capabilities include chats, group chats of up to 1,000 people, file sharing, document scanning, and secret chats. It has so far recorded a total of 20,000 downloads on Apple’s App store and Google Pay.
Also Read: India Inc. cautions employees on WhatsApp privacy policy changes
“Let’s say you plan a group lunch with five people. Is there a way where this app can sort of facilitate going beyond planning the lunch — maybe splitting the bill, maybe making the payment? So, these are the kind of use cases we are thinking of now,” Singh said.
Upcoming features include end-to-end encryption, a digital locker, cloud storage and games. App data will not be shared with third parties and will be stored in India, Singh said.