With Zoom facing the heat for its privacy and security issues, most people have started moving to alternate platforms in a bid to make meetings and online classes more secure. Although popular apps like Google Meet, Skype and Cisco Webex are the perfect options for most users, there’s another video conferencing app that can be claimed as a Zoom alternative from India. Called Say Namaste, the video conferencing software is made by a company called Inscripts. Anuj Garg, the co-founder and the CEO of Inscripts says that Say Namaste app is still under beta and has garnered over 500,000 users within a few days.
Say Namaste is said to use both proprietary and open source tech for now. “These include a number of proprietary encryption standards that we already offer to our larger customers in the banking and medical industries (through CometChat). We are still looking at multiple options in terms of the kind of encryption standard that the service will deploy. These include exploring how end-to-end encryption works best with our service without affecting performance. We are using different techniques for this, such as encrypting data packets in transit, cryptographic keys and so on,” said Garg.
On the feature side of things, the CEO says he doesn’t want to an “build an all-purpose communications suite” but will focus on easy to use interface. To use Say Namaste, a user for now, needs to create a meeting link using a randomly generated 10-digit ID and four-digit password and other users can join the session. Like seen in Zoom, there is no ‘waiting room’ wherein one person approves who joins the meeting one by one.
Right now, Say Namaste can support 25 callers at once but the company’s aim is to reach 100 callers limit per session. Besides video-calling, the app also supports screen sharing, file sharing and text chats.
Say Namaste, as mentioned above, is in beta phase and available only on the web. However, the Android and iOS apps have already been submitted.
Garg states that Say Namaste will be one of the participants for government’s recently introduced 1 crore challenge to create a Zoom alternative.