Raj Shamani is using Kalakaar.
I’m Saif, and I still have to say that out loud to believe it. Raj Shamani - using the software that I made. Honestly, it doesn’t fully make sense to me yet.
And it’s not just him. Varun Mayya. Tech Burner. Nitin Joshi. The team at KK Create. Startup Pakistan. And over 100,000 creators from across South Asia. Ek laakh users. On a tool I built in a corner of my life, mostly for myself.
Here’s the funny part: I didn’t build Kalakaar for a hundred thousand people.
Why I made it
I talk in Hinglish in my videos. That’s just how I speak, and how a huge chunk of South Asia speaks. But every captioning tool I tried treated that like a bug. Feed it a sentence that switches from Hindi to English mid-flow, and it would mangle the words, drop the meaning, or guess something completely random.
There was simply no software that did accurate captioning for South Asian languages - the way we actually speak them, mixed and messy and real. So I stopped waiting for someone else to build it and built it myself.
That’s the whole origin story. No grand business plan. Just an itch that nothing on the market could scratch.
“This is not AI”
I want to be clear about this because it matters to me: Kalakaar is not an AI wrapper you throw a video at and pray.
It’s built specifically to understand how South Asian creators talk - the code-switching, the accents, the slang, the rhythm of Hinglish. It’s engineered for our languages, not retrofitted for them. That precision is the entire point, and it’s why the captions actually land instead of turning into word salad.
What’s shipping next
Crossing a lakh users isn’t a finish line - it’s a reason to move faster. So here’s what’s coming:
Plugins for Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve - If you edit inside your NLE, Kalakaar will live right there with you, no jumping between tools.
A web version - already out. Nothing to install. Open it, drop your video, get clean captions.
We’re going to keep making it better and better.
Try it!
If you haven’t used Kalakaar yet, try it. It takes a minute, and if you make videos in any South Asian language, I think it’ll feel like something built for you - because it was.
And if you’re already a Kalakaar user: thank you. Genuinely. Thank you for trusting a desi product - one built at home, for how we actually speak. A hundred thousand of you took a chance on that idea. I don’t take it lightly.
This started as a tool for one person who was tired of bad captions. Somehow it became a tool for a hundred thousand of us.
Chalo, ab aur behtar banate hain.
