Actor Rajinikanth shares first ‘hoot’ on daughter’s newly launched voice-based social network

New Delhi: A regular voice message that Soundarya Rajinikanth received from her cinema superstar father Rajinikanth gave her the idea to launch the voice-first social networking platform Hootee. Launching the Hootee mobile application in 15 native Indian languages, Co-Founder Soundarya Rajinikanth and entrepreneur Sunny Pokla said Hootee aims to enable users to share and disseminate their content, ideas through recorded 60-second voice clips. was able to do. They see voice-based social media as a means to capture real emotion, nuance, and context, as opposed to text-based social media.

This made-in-India technology offering, available on both Android and iOS, is aimed at English-speaking urban users and rural audiences who may not be comfortable using an English-first social media app. It is also being seen as a means for politicians, celebrities, eminent professionals and industrialists to connect with a larger audience through voice. The name of the app is inspired by the call of the owl, which goes by the same name. Soundarya said that the white owl is said to be a symbol of knowledge.

It was in December 2020, when Rajini was planning his political endeavor and acting in a film, sent a voice message to his daughter in Tamil, due to her inability to write/message in the same language. Realizing the power of voice-based communication, Soundarya reached out to Sunny and started producing Hootee in early 2021. “That (Rajni’s political entry) did not happen because of circumstances, but it (hoote) happened”, she says proudly.

Sharing his first 60-second voice clip on the app, Rajni said that Hootee also provided an opportunity to illiterate individuals to easily share their thoughts to the world through their voices. As advisors to the founders, Girish Mathrubhumi of FreshWorks fame and Silicon Valley investor Arvind Parthasarathy shared their wishes and lauded the idea of ​​harnessing the power of the voice.

According to the founders, Hoot users will be able to share image and background music, create and be part of private and public groups with their voice clips. Some of the upcoming features include, availability in 10 international languages, pinned Hoot, accessing multiple profiles from a single device, adding background music to voice clips, privacy controls for listening to Hoot, subtitles for different languages, text and more. Option to listen to voice comments, audio teasers and trailers. They see Hoot as an aggregator for voice content across all genres and languages.

When asked what kind of user-data and revenue model (ad-driven or freemium) the app will collect, the founders told Zee Media that it will only collect basic information like name, profession, contact information at that time. to sign up. “There are no fees and it is not monetized using ad revenue. We want to make the app popular”, he said.

When asked how they plan to take on the existing social media giants, the founders said that Hoot was not meant to be a director competitor. The founders said that Hootee will also include security measures to monitor abusive content and allow users to report it and be compliant with all Indian laws, in addition to stringent verification.

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