AI engineer builds app for blind students in higher education; over 1,000 use it to read in 30 languages

It began with a conversation between two fathers in Pune. One mentioned that his visually-impaired daughter was struggling to find study material for her PhD. The other asked his son, an engineer, to see if AI could help. That son, Yogen Ghodke, built ListenToMe, a free app now used by over 1,000 people.

What started as a friendly favour has now travelled well beyond Pune. Schoolchildren, university students, and competitive exam aspirants now use the app, Ghodke told Careers360 . Nearly 1,000 users have registered, and about 50 more join everyday.

One of them is Vikas Godadiya, 23, who is pursuing higher studies in history at Gujarat University, and hopes to become a professor. “I studied using braille books at school, but accessing study material became more difficult in higher education. Preparing for examinations was challenging because books were not always available in formats I needed, and I had to depend on others for reading and writing,” he said. He now listens to his PDFs on the app.

Ghodke, an AI engineer working in the United States, wants to take the idea further.  He now wants to work with institutions to convert study material into audio and make them available to students.

Ghodke said he is developing the platform through user feedback and wants to keep the app free and is expecting support from educational institutions, non-governmental organisations and companies through corporate social responsibility (CSR).

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Braille Books, Study Material: The accessibility gap

Ghodke first learned about the problem through Seema Kharad, a visually impaired political science student pursuing her PhD, whom his father had asked to help.

“I spoke to Seema and asked her what problems she was facing and what would help her the most. Based on that conversation, I developed a basic version of the app and showed it to her. She kept giving me feedback, and over the next two months, we continued improving it,” Ghodke said.

Braille books are relatively easier to access at school level, but higher education demands advanced, specialised textbooks and reference books that are far harder to source.

The experience is familiar to other users of the app. Godadiya said he had tried several applications to read PDFs, including a paid app that cost him Rs 720, but it did not adequately support Gujarati. Three of his brothers, who are also visually impaired, also use ListenToMe.

For Amarjyoti Bhattacharya, 36, from Chandannagar, West Bengal, the need is different. Diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disorder at around 15, he gradually lost his ability to read printed material and has been unable to do so for the past 7-8 years. He has completed his MA, works in the government sector and is preparing for the Staff Selection Commission's Combined Graduate Level (SSC CGL) examination.

Bhattacharya uses ListenToMe to listen to general knowledge books, PDFs and newspapers, including PDF editions of The Hindu newspaper. He also finds it useful at work, where he sometimes receives official notices that need to be read quickly.

“The app converts such documents into audio in hardly five to 10 seconds. I particularly like the AI voice because it sounds more natural and is less monotonous than conventional text-to-speech softwares,” he said.

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For Ghodke, these experiences show why students should not have to depend on others to read documents or find separate apps for their study material. Under his plan, universities could convert commonly prescribed books into audio and share them with students, who would not necessarily need to install the app themselves.

Ghodke said he had not yet approached universities but hoped to explore partnerships with them, as well as with schools and government institutions.

AI App: Beyond text-to-speech

ListenToMe can process different types of study material, including scanned textbooks, handwritten notes, photographs, diagrams and tables. Ghodke said simply converting text into audio may not be enough, especially when students need to understand visual information in lengthy documents.

For example, listening to all 150 rows of a table can make it difficult to retain the information. The app can summarise tables and describe diagrams. Its recently-introduced Ask AI feature also allows users to ask questions about the material they upload. Students can use the feature to summarise a chapter, understand a table or find specific information without listening to the entire document again.

The app supports around 28 to 30 languages, including English, Marathi, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. It initially supported Marathi and English, with Ghodke adding more languages in response to user requests.

“When I started getting messages from Tamil Nadu, I added Tamil. Recently, somebody uploaded a Persian document, so I added support for that language as well,” he said.

According to Ghodke, a 100-page document takes approximately five minutes to convert into audio, while shorter documents can be processed much faster.

Users, however, say the technology still needs refinement. Bhattacharya has suggested improvements to the app’s optical character recognition (OCR) feature, which extracts text from images and scanned documents.

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Godadiya has reported interruptions in Gujarati audio and suggested adding page numbers, total page counts and an estimate of the remaining listening time. He has also suggested allowing users to jump directly to a chapter or topic in lengthy textbooks.

Ghodke said user feedback has helped him identify and fix problems. In the early stages, the app sometimes read numbers digit by digit instead of recognising them as complete figures. He said he fixed the issue after users reported it.

Users can contact him through WhatsApp or email to share feedback and report technical problems.

Sharad Choudhary, a postgraduate from Indore, who has been blind since birth, has been testing the app for around 10 to 15 days. He has used it to read books in Hindi, including those by Chetan Bhagat.  “I am preparing for the assistant professor examination and would like to use the app for my studies,” he said.

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Built for screen-reader users

Ghodke said accessibility was a priority from the start. “ListenToMe works with screen readers such as TalkBack on Android and VoiceOver on Apple devices, which help users navigate phones and apps through audio,” he said.

He said applications can be difficult for blind users if buttons and other controls lack accessibility labels. He has therefore added labels to the app's features and kept the interface simple.

He is also working on a feature to help users position their phone cameras when photographing printed documents. The idea came from an elderly woman with low vision who found it difficult to frame documents correctly. The proposed feature would give spoken instructions to move the camera up, down or sideways before automatically capturing the image.

Ghodke pays the app’s operating costs himself and does not charge users to convert documents into audio. He wants to keep the service free for everyone. However, running the app involves costs for document processing, audio generation and cloud storage.

Ghodke said Hexaware, where he works as an AI engineer in New Jersey, had responded positively to the project after his manager shared details with the company’s leadership. Discussions followed on possible promotional and CSR support. However, ListenToMe remains his personal project, which he works on outside office hours.

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How it spread

Although ListenToMe began as a tool for a PhD student, it has now reached competitive examination aspirants and schoolchildren.

Ghodke said the app had reached people preparing for the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC), Maharashtra Public Service Commission (MPSC) and other recruitment exams for government jobs. Most users are in India, although the app has also attracted registrations from other countries.

A school in Tamil Nadu is using the app to convert textbooks into audio for students in classes 5 and 6. Ghodke believes WhatsApp groups and word of mouth have helped the app reach more users.