Learning a new language could be a skill that improves your travel experience or even saves your life, considering the current scenario of language debates across the country. A young tech professional from Agartala, Tripura, has developed a product around this problem – how to efficiently learn a new language. 

As Bishal Saha, 26, talked about creating Bhasha with AIM, he elaborated that it wasn’t meant to be a grand, venture-funded bet. “I just wanted something like Duolingo, but for Indian languages.” 

What began as a side project using Google’s Translate APIs has grown into something much bigger: a full-fledged mobile app for learning Indian languages, built almost entirely by one person, powered by AI, and quietly attracting thousands of users.

Bhasha currently supports over a dozen languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, and more recently, Odia, Manipuri and Sanskrit. Saha intends to add Assamese and even lesser-known languages. 

“People write in asking for languages I’ve never even heard of,” he laughed. Duolingo only supports four Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and Telugu.

What’s the Moat?

Unlike Duolingo, which focuses on teaching English to Indian users, Bhasha flips the script: “I want someone visiting a different Indian state to be able to quickly learn how to greet, ask for directions, or even bargain,” Saha said. 

The key difference lies in the engine behind Bhasha. Instead of Google’s APIs, which only support about 10 Indian languages well, Saha moved to using datasets and services from Bhashini—the government’s Indian language AI platform. “I’m not funded by the government, I’m not tied up with them,” he clarified. “I’m simply using their open services, with access provided by the team.”

The impact was better pronunciation checking, more accurate speech-to-text, and a growing set of supported languages. “Google’s tools just weren’t cutting it. With Bhashini, I can do justice to the languages,” he said.

All of this has been built by Saha himself. The app is developed in React Native using FireBase with a shared codebase for iOS and Android. The backend is minimal. AI plays a central role—not just in powering the features, but in building the app itself. “90% of the code is AI-written,” he said. 

“Claude was a game-changer for me. Even the freehand letter recognition system I built doesn’t use image recognition—it’s a static framework that works offline, built with Claude’s help,” Saha claimed.

Even the courses themselves are generated using AI. With no team to write content manually, Saha used a combination of ChatGPT and Claude to create structured, progressive lessons across languages.

Yet for all its impressive functionality, Bhasha remains an indie app, with no marketing and no recent updates—until now. Saha admits the app had gone stale. “I didn’t update it for six months. I’ve been rebuilding everything—logo, website, the whole stack.” A new version is expected to roll out in a few weeks with more languages, better UI, and new learning mechanics.

So, what’s in store?

Despite reaching 25,000 users purely through word-of-mouth and organic searches, Saha hasn’t taken the investor route. “I sold my previous company, Omniplex, and the money I made is what’s keeping this going,” he said. 

“Investors today are only interested in scale. I’m not from IIT. I didn’t work at a FAANG company. So I’m invisible to them.” Saha is the same guy who built an open source Perplexity alternative over the weekend after getting rejected twice from the company.

But he’s okay with that. In fact, he prefers it. “This way, I don’t have to chase growth. I can just focus on building.”

Saha believes his moat is not just the tech or the content—it’s the head start. 

“Someone passionate might come along and try to build something like this. But I’ve spent a year already. You’ll have to grind through the same hurdles—datasets, speech APIs, UI, and user testing. And this market isn’t attractive enough for big players yet. That’s what gives me time,” he said.

His ambition for Bhasha is to become the default destination for learning any Indian language. “If you’re moving to Bengaluru and want to learn Kannada, or going to Odisha and want to pick up a few words of Odia, you shouldn’t open Duolingo. You should open Bhasha.”

Looking ahead, Saha plans to expand Bhasha’s framework to other regions and even international languages. “The way I’ve built the app, it’s modular. I can swap datasets and suddenly, it can teach Spanish or Korean too.”

But for now, he’s staying focused on Indian languages. “Nobody else is doing this. Multibhashi is focused on live classes. Bhasha Sangam is outdated. My app, I believe, is the closest thing to what an Indian Duolingo should feel like.”

And he’s not afraid of the giants entering the ring. “If Duolingo starts adding more Indian languages, that’s a win for me. It validates what I’ve been doing.”

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