Aitizaz Hassan

Tellotalk, Pakistan’s first-ever chatting messenger, is meant for providing a local independent communication source to the people of the country, WealthPK reports.

The chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder of Tellotalk, Shahbaz Ali Jamote said that Tellotalk was Pakistan’s first fully homegrown social messaging platform for smartphones. “Previously, there have been attempts at building messaging services on SMS platform, but never as over-the-top (OTT) apps for connected smartphone users,” he told WealthPK.

Tellotalk has more than two million downloads on its Android and iPhone operating system (IOS) platforms. All the features expected from quality and state-of-the-art messengers such as person-to-person chat, group chat, voice and video calling, multimedia sharing and document sharing are available in Tellotalk.

Shahbaz Ali said that the government could take direct advantage of the homegrown and secure social messaging platform by adopting it for internal communication purposes. It will allow for an extra layer of digital security and compliance with total reliance on a local platform for quality messaging services. Besides, the government services such as emergency helplines, utility bill payments, document and application tracking alerts can be integrated and launched on this platform.

“Tellotalk is built upon the unique value proposition of hyper-localisation. It integrates regional language keyboards, local content newsfeeds, music and videos for communication along with content,” said Shahbaz Ali.

He said that Tellotalk was more than just a messenger. It allows users to publicly share music, videos and pictures besides providing the options of “like” and “comment” on the contents of other users. Tellotalk users can also find new friends by chatting in interest-based chatrooms. They can send connection requests to other users without sharing personal phone numbers with them.

“Very soon Tellotalk will also be integrating payment services as well to make sending and receiving payments as easy as sending and receiving messages,” said Shahbaz Ali.

He said that Tellotalk was proud to have seven languages including English, Urdu, Sindhi, Balochi, Punjabi, Seraiki and Pashto. He said that Tellotalk had exclusive stickers, which were developed in-house, and a design to be a reflection of Pakistani culture, emotions and sentiments.

He said that Tellotalk team came together and re-launched the platform in July 2017. One of the biggest challenges of building the platform locally was to develop the local technology stack, infrastructure and software for which there was little talent available in the market.

“A lot of efforts went into making a state-of-the-art scalable communications platform, which is also hosted in Pakistan. With the technology now established and the platform built for scale, there are a lot of more aggressive awareness campaigns that will be launched for user network growth,” Shahbaz Ali told WealthPK.

Credit : Independent News Pakistan-WealthPk