Parakh
For food packets
Photograph a nutrition label, get a plain-language verdict.
What’s in it, how processed it is, and a one-line answer you can use in the shop. It isn’t medical advice, and it doesn’t know your health history.
Open ParakhPoint your phone. Understand what you’re looking at.
We’re two people building small, free tools for reading the things around you. Photograph a nutrition label or a printed page, and get it back in plain words, in your own language. There’s nothing to sign up for.
See the two apps
What both apps hold to
- No accounts, no data harvesting
- Nothing to sign up for and no profile to fill in. You open the app and use it. We don’t collect your details to sell or to build anything around you.
- Plain language, always
- Answers come back in everyday words that anyone can follow, whether or not they read English or fine print comfortably.
- Indian languages first
- Built for the languages people here read and speak, from the start. Not an English app with translations added later.
- Honest about limits
- When an app isn’t sure, it says so. Parakh isn’t medical advice. Vachak marks a word it can’t read instead of guessing.
- Free by design
- Nothing to buy and no paid tier. We keep both apps small so they stay cheap to run and free to use.
The two apps
Both run in your phone’s browser. You can add either one to your home screen, but you don’t have to.
Vachak
For printed pages
Photograph any printed page, hear it read aloud in your language.
A letter, a notice, a medicine strip, a page of a book. It reads the words as printed, marks any it can’t make out, and keeps nothing afterwards.
Open VachakWhy we’re building this
A lot of what matters in daily life arrives as small print: the back of a packet, a notice from the panchayat, a letter, the strip on a medicine. The person holding it isn’t always the person who can read it easily, or in the language it was printed in.
A phone camera can already see the page. We want it to tell you what the page says, plainly, in your language, without asking anything of you first. That is the whole idea behind both apps.
It’s early. There are two apps and a small number of people using them, and we’d rather get them right than grow them fast.
— the two of us at Iksha