Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment, Ramdas Athawale, on Thursday launched Lingocap (lingocap.in), a communication portal created by Shivansh Kulshrestha, an 11th grade student. Lingocap is the country’s first ever communication service that specifically caters to the hearing and speech impaired community of India.
The platform is the first to make real time speech captioning available for video communication in five Indian languages and strives to make communication accessible and inclusive for its target group.
Kulshrestha is a student at Delhi Public School, Vasant Kunj. In early 2020, his hearing-impaired grandfather had moved to Jaipur for treatment, leading to difficulties in communicating with him, since none of the modern video-communication mavens such as Zoom, Google Meets, or Skype, provided captioning for Indian languages. The young student identified this as a notable gap in the industry and created Lingocap with the aim of providing a service for speakers of Indian languages with hearing impairments to enable effective communication with their loved ones. This service offers a unique point of accessibility and inclusivity to Indians with speech and hearing impairments, who number at approximately 75 Lakhs and more.
The young, enterprising student took on this ambitious project with the goal of creating a tangible change in the lives of a community that has been systematically marginalised in this country. He did so through individual initiative, learning the basics of setting up captioning & video communication software through taking online courses and allowing a drive for social betterment to push his dream forward.
The communication portal solves for accessible communication through live speech captioning in Indian languages and a network of qualified ISL interpreters. Additionally, as a video conferencing platform, it has the availability of all standard features such as breakout rooms, screen sharing, white board communication, and more, placing it at par with other video conferencing giants in terms of features, accessibility, and efficiency.
Lingocap has made a considerable impact in a short time on its 1,350+ users which consists of deaf students & individuals along with their family members.