Anas Abou Allaban was one of the participants of Muslim Hacks, an event that took place at California. At this event participants share their technological ideas and solutions to build products for people practicing Islam. Allaban is an electrical and computer engineering student, Northeastern University was fascinated by a hack which used speech recognition tool that helps Muslims to recite their prayers.
In order to keep up with the pronunciation of words, a process is involved that abides a set of rules known as Tajweed. These are educated by a special set of instructors. According to Allaban finding the qualified set of instructors might be hard or even be engaged. Hence, Allaban summed up with a team of engineers from Twitter and the Stanford doctoral student who devised it and posted a promotional video on Facebook.
This turned out to be really well as Muslims were looking out for such a tool and the video earned around 600,000 views and 700 shares. As a result, their tool Tarteel.io has grown into a startup company and was accepted by the MassChallenge, global business accelerator program for companies.
Allaban says, “Our primary purpose is allowing Muslims to read and recite the Quran correctly without the need of reaching out to an instructor, so we’re automating that process”
Tarteel.io works on a particular database that holds recitation of verse they have collected from both professional reciters and ordinary Muslims. Allaban says they have collected 70,000 verse so far out of which 6,000 verse are unique.
With 1.7 billion Muslims around the world and 3.45 million Muslims in the United States alone, Allaban says he trusts the potential of the app that it can help even the least of the Muslims.
Allaban says, “If you even support one percent of that population, that’s an amazing product.”
Justin Aaron
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