Why We Built Samjha: Meeting Notes for the Way South Asia Actually Talks
The first time we ran a real Pakistani standup through a famous AI notetaker, the transcript came back missing every decision that mattered. The English small talk survived. The actual work, discussed in Urdu and English mixed mid-sentence, was gone. That transcript is the reason Samjha exists.
The Meeting That Started It
It was an ordinary Tuesday standup. Eight people, half in Karachi, half remote. Someone said: "Client ne approve kar diya hai, but they want the revised pricing by Friday, toh hum Thursday tak draft bhej dete hain." One sentence. One decision. One deadline.
The transcript from the tool we were paying $17 a month for read: "Client... approve... but they want the revised pricing by Friday... draft." The deadline was gone. Who was sending the draft was gone. Three days later, no draft had gone out, and everyone swore someone else owned it.
We tried four other tools that month. Every one of them was excellent at English and helpless the moment the conversation switched, which in a Pakistani office is roughly every nine seconds.
The Problem Is Bigger Than Pakistan
Hundreds of millions of professionals work in two languages at once. Urdu-English in Pakistan. Hindi-English in India. Bengali-English in Bangladesh. Arabic-English-Hindi-Urdu on a single Dubai call. Tagalog-English in Manila. Linguists call it code-switching; everyone who does it just calls it talking.
The big transcription companies treat this as an edge case. For us it is the whole case. A tool that only captures the English half of a meeting is not 50% useful. It is close to 0% useful, because the decisions, the disagreements, and the deadlines are exactly the parts people say in their first language.
What We Decided Samjha Had to Do
- Transcribe mixed-language speech as one continuous conversation, not as English with holes in it
- Let you read Urdu as Nastaliq script or Roman Urdu with one toggle, because teams genuinely disagree about which they prefer
- Keep speaker identification working through language switches instead of inventing phantom speakers
- Write the AI summary and action items from the whole meeting, both languages, so nothing assigned in Urdu vanishes
- Price it in PKR and take JazzCash, Easypaisa, Raast, and bank transfer, because most of our users do not have an international credit card and should not need one
Why the Name "Samjha"
Samjha (سمجھا) means "understood." It is what you say when something finally clicks: samjha! It is also the one-word review we want from every user after their first meeting: it understood me, accent, language switches and all.
That is the bar. Not "supports 99 languages" as a line in a feature table, but actually understanding a real Lahore sales call or a Dhaka product review, the way a bilingual colleague sitting in the room would.
Where We Are Today
Samjha records meetings live, joins your Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams calls as a bot, and imports audio files you already have. Every conversation comes back as a full transcript with speakers, an AI summary, action items with owners, an outline, and a chat where you can ask "what did we decide about pricing?" in English, Urdu, or both.
The free plan gives you 100 minutes a month, no credit card. If it earns a place in your week, Pro is $15 a month, around ₨4,000, payable the way you actually pay for things.
We built Samjha because we needed it ourselves and could not buy it anywhere. If your meetings sound like ours, it was built for you too. Try it at samjha.com.