Mamata Banerjee Launches New Document Scanning App
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has launched a new CamScanner alternative app called ‘SelfScan’ for scanning documents. The CM stated that the app, which has been developed in India, reflects patriotism.
“I would always want to use an app prepared in my country. It reflects patriotism. What Bengal thinks today, the whole world thinks tomorrow," Banerjee said after launching the application. The app, at the time of writing this article, was not available for download on the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.
The Chief Minister said that the application will be made available on the app store and will be free and completely safe.
"Self Scan is a completely safe and protected app. No data is saved on the server. Documents can be edited too on the application besides the scanning feature," she added.
The Self Scan website states that data remains on the device. It also does not capture any personal data of the user, nor stores cookies or background data.
"This is like your sweet home where no intruder will be able to poke his nose (into it) and snatch away your privacy," she said and thanked the IT department secretary, Rajeev Kumar, and his team for developing the document scanning app.
Furthermore, the app claims to scan the document inside the user’s device without sending it to the server. Also, the app does not require an internet connection to scan documents or even for Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
OCR support is presently for English and the developers are working on bringing support Bengali, Hindi and other languages. Since the data is not sent to servers, it poses many challenges in improving the app’s ability to scan handwritten text. However, developers claim to be working on a solution to the problem.
The demand for home-grown apps been on the rise after the India-China border dispute, followed by the Indian government’s ban on Chinese apps.
