Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu Shares Multilingual Guide for ‘Arattai’ App

The founder of Zoho, Sridhar Vembu, kept audiences spellbound with a cultural and linguistic outreach never seen before: a social media guide instructing users on pronouncing "Arattai", the homegrown messaging app of Zoho, in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, French, Spanish, and Japanese. The Tamil word "Arattai" translates as "informal chit-chat", calling to mind the warm, spontaneous essence of the banter of street-side chat, intentionally reflecting the many informal and friendly characteristics the app was designed to exemplify.

The Technology Behind Arattai’s Simplicity

Vembu said Arattai, though seemingly simple on the surface, is backed by over 20 years of Zoho's proprietary R&D in messaging and audio-video frameworks. This deep background allows it to provide high-quality voice and video calls while also promising a smooth and robust messaging experience derived from a distributed server architecture that is designed for fault tolerance and secure performance. 

The current buzz of Arattai also highlights the upcoming end-to-end encryption (E2EE) rollout for text chats, which is already available for voice and video calls. Vembu mentioned that the internal testing for E2EE for messages is on, and the feature will be rolled out earlier than originally planned to enhance user privacy. He reassured that Zoho follows a strict no-access policy to data, further cementing the trust of users as the company establishes itself as a privacy-centric option amidst international messaging giants.

The reactions on social media emphasised the branding uniqueness of the app and the cultural significance of its name. Users were excited not only by its linguistic inclusivity but also by the future encryption enhancement, indicating a fast-growing appetite for secure communication tools in both personal and professional settings. 

Vembu looks beyond Arattai. He sees Zoho as a research-driven lab solving long-term technology challenges across security, AI, and software infrastructure, with Arattai as a tangible by-product of that innovation pipeline. Arattai's fusion of cultural identity and technological rigour with privacy-first design makes it a unique offering in the cacophony of Indian tech, dovetailing nicely with the national vision of data sovereignty and digital self-reliance.