Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu, who is riding on the success of his WhatsApp alternative – Arattai – has dropped a guide on how one can say the name of his chat and calling app in multiple languages. 

‘Say Arattai in various languages’

“How to say ‘Arattai’ in various languages,” wrote Sridhar Vembu while sharing the guide on X (formerly Twitter). The guide has several languages, including Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi. 

In response to this, one social media user said, “Keep the name Arattai. Love it.” Vembu replied to the comment and said that he is not changing the name of the app. 

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“Did you know ‘Arattai’ isn’t just branding-it literally means ‘casual conversation’ in Tamil, evoking the warm, brotherly banter of street-side gossip. Other tongues have their own flavour: in French papoter tosses in a dash of whimsy, in Spanish parlotear feels like rapid-fire banter, and in Japanese おしゃべり (oshaberi) whispers of cosy chatter sessions,” read another comment. 

A third posted, “It’s a perfect name & also very unique too. Waiting for the End-to-End Encryption update.”

Some even called it great marketing. 

Vembu, while talking about Arattai, said that although the app may appear simple on the surface, it is built on more than two decades of “in-house engineering and research”.  

“Arattai is on the surface a simple product, but it has a lot of depth inside,” he wrote on X. 

End-to-end encryption on Arattai in process: Vembu

Vembu explained that the app operates on Zoho’s own messaging and audio-video framework, which has been evolving for about 15 years. This same system, he said, powers Zoho’s seamless video calls and meetings, offering users quick connectivity and clear communication across platforms.

“First is what we call our messaging/AV framework. This has been the ‘real-time’ workhorse of Zoho for a while, and this is what offers you those crisp calls and meetings that connect quickly. It has been perfected for 15 years.” 

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He went on to say, “Then we have a distributed framework that allows us to distribute the workload among many servers and databases, and provides fault tolerance, performance monitoring, security and so on. This is the backbone of Zoho and powers a lot of what you see on the surface, and also keeps our systems secure. We have been perfecting this for over 20 years now!”

On data privacy, Vembu mentioned that Arattai already supports end-to-end encryption for calls and that the team is currently testing the same feature for chats, which will be rolled out soon.

When a user asked whether private pictures shared between a husband and wife would remain confidential, Vembu responded, “Our entire SAS business is based on the trust that we do not access customer data and we do not use it for selling stuff to them. End-to-end encryption is a technical feature that is coming,” he said, before adding, “Trust is far far more precious and we are earning that trust daily in the global market. We will continue to fulfil the trust of every user of our product everywhere.”