Dear Donors,
As you know, the languages we're adressing in our project are Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Urdu, Kannada, Odia, Malayalam and Punjabi.
Thanks to your support, we've been able to fully complete the translation and audio recording of our contents in Urdu. The Hindi version is almost done, too - we're just awaiting the finalization of the audio content here any day.
With the Urdu version, we're reaching out to 51 million first language speakers worldwide already. With the upcoming Hindi version, we'll cover another 528 million first language speakers. This is really huge! None of this would have been possible without your generous help. So thank you very, very much!
There's no need to tell you that COVID-19 has turned the whole world upside down overnight. We are all in this together, so you know about the unforeseen challenge of this pandemic. The coronavirus affects all of our lives. But in the poorest countries it will be devastating. Especially for women and girls, who will be on the frontlines of the response.
For the time being, we therefore spontaneously decided to focus on providing vital knowledge about corona to the marginalized to help them protect themselves and their families. This is why we started to reach out to billions by using WhatsApp and similar services to spread localized audio messages about COVID-19.
Up to now, our contents about COVID-19 have been translated into 64 languages, 35 of which have been recorded as audio messages already. You can read more about this so-to-say "spin-off project" here: https://www.audiopedia.org/corona
Right now, as you will certainly understand, a lot of our time and effort is dedicated to this project, given its immediate urgency. However, we'll still keep up working on our other projects. We will keep you posted on any progress made!
Thanks again for all your support and stay healthy!
Dear Donor,
Your kind donations to our project have allowed us to focus our localization efforts on three major Indian languages: Hindi, Urdu and Bengali. We chose those languages, as two of them are also the main languages in Pakistan and Bangladesh respectively. The total number of people that speak those languages are 615 million for Hindi, 265 million for Bengali and 170 million for Urdu. We expect to finish the recording of at least two of those languages by the end of March. The recorded contents will the be published on our platform Audiopedia.io
In addition to this, we have explored a complete new and very promising way of disseminating our educational audio contents in this region: smart feature phones! Smart feature phones represent an entirely new category of devices that have the power to guide the more than two billion feature phone users toward more advanced, efficient technology. They are based on an operating system called KaiOS. KaiOS promises to bring modern apps such as WhatsApp to people who never owned a smartphone. Thus, its interface is designed for the so-called dumbphones with physical keys and non-touch screens. The latest smart feature phone was just released in Pakistan for US$ 11 ...
We have already adapted our current Audiopedia App for smart feature phones - and it's fantastic! This will surely help us to scale our impact substantially.
Thank you so much for you great support! We could do nothing without your loyal and dependable help!
Best regards,
The URIDU Team
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