Millions of bright students. Books they cannot see.
India has more blind children than any country on earth, and most study in classrooms where the textbook, the blackboard, and the diagram on page 132 are simply out of reach. Screen readers help — but a PDF full of scanned pages, broken Hindi text, and unlabeled figures reads as silence.
Suno Dost turns the textbook itself into a patient, talking teacher. A student simply speaks — “मुझे विद्युत के बारे में सिखाओ”, “read me the chapter on tissues”, “give me an exam on light” — and a warm voice answers, from the book, in seconds.
Counts measured from the deployed corpus on 20 September 2026. “Ingested” means the chapter is searchable and readable; it does not mean every figure, table or exercise in it is usable. Ask Suno Dost for your book and class and it will tell you what it actually has.
A real conversation, not a recording
Students talk to Suno Dost the way they would talk to a favourite teacher — interrupt it, ask it to slow down, ask “why?” three times in a row. It reads chapters aloud with voice navigation, runs practice quizzes and full spoken exams, walks a curious mind through how a topic grows from Class 6 to Class 12, and describes the figures and diagrams sighted students take for granted.
Reading mode
Any chapter read aloud in the student's own book's words — say “next”, “back”, or “where am I” to move around, and “continue” to pick up where you left off.
Quiz & exam mode
Spoken practice questions built word-for-word from the textbook, and a full five-question exam with the score — and a kind review of every miss — at the end.
Diagrams, described
Figures are explained through descriptions approved by a human reviewer — a short overview first, and the full picture when the student says “more”.
Maths that speaks
Fractions, roots and equations follow a spoken-math convention designed for listening — in English and, for the first time anywhere, in Hindi.
Braille, three ways
Type to Suno Dost in braille with VoiceOver's Braille Screen Input or TalkBack's braille keyboard; read every full answer on a Bluetooth braille display; and say “braille seekho” to practise braille itself. On Android Chrome the phone buzzes each letter's dots; iPhone browsers cannot vibrate, so there the dots are sound and speech — and every exercise, including building a letter dot by dot, works from the keyboard alone. Phone vibration teaches the PATTERN of a cell; it is not a raised-dot surface and does not replace a braille display or a teacher.
What we actually do — and where it can still fail
A sighted student can check a wrong answer against the page. A blind student usually cannot, so the safeguards below matter more here than almost anywhere. They are real, and they are not a guarantee: grounding an answer in the book does not make choosing the right book, extracting it cleanly, or interpreting it correctly impossible to get wrong. An independent review in September 2026 found each of those three failing, and each finding is named below.
Every sentence must carry a citation to a passage we actually served the model, and one that does not is refused rather than spoken. That rejects unsupported citations — it does not prove the sentence follows from the passage, and it cannot stop every invention. Choosing the right passage, extracting it cleanly and reading it correctly are separate problems, and independent reviews have found all three failing.
Figure descriptions are drafted, adversarially checked, and then approved by a person — and only an approved description is ever spoken. 161 of the 3,910 figures we have found are approved so far. For the other 96%, Suno Dost declines and offers to read the text around the figure instead.
Scanned pages that fail our quality gates are withheld rather than read aloud. The gates catch mis-decoded text and mangled formulae. They do not catch everything: a corpus audit currently flags about 10,000 word-level extraction defects, and those words are barred from questions and exams while they await correction against the source pages.
Every answer names the chapter and section it came from, and the student can then ask Suno Dost to read that exact section aloud — so checking an answer does not depend on having a sighted reader nearby — which is what makes the safeguards above auditable rather than a promise.
If Suno Dost gets something wrong, tell us. Say “that is wrong” to it, or email us the question and what it said. Reports are read by a person.
Where the research is going — we are already there
The most exciting work in blind education right now — touchscreen braille, dynamic tactile displays, AI tutors that cite their sources — is happening in a handful of labs and pilot programs around the world. Suno Dost's job is to take each proven idea and hand it, free, to every student in India with a phone.
Live today
A voice math workspace — the paper blind students never had: dictate each algebra step aloud and a deterministic engine applies and verifies it exactly, holds the equation for you, and reads it back on demand. Scribe practice — rehearse board-exam dictation with a scribe that reads your answer back verbatim and names the textbook terms you missed. Camera reading — photograph any printed page and it is read aloud and open to questions, behind the same quality gates as our corpus. Surroundings description — ask "what's around me?" and hear the room described in your own frame: ahead, left, right — honest about uncertainty, and deliberately never a walking guide: the cane stays the safety layer. Explore figures by touch — after any verified diagram description, slide a finger to feel where its parts sit. Plus everything before: braille you can feel on-screen (an interaction inspired by V-Braille at the University of Washington — their study validated their own prototype, not ours), Bharati Braille following the Government's published standard (letter dot-patterns only — capital signs, punctuation and contractions are not taught yet, and no braille teacher has yet signed off the curriculum), the tap language, hands-free voice, spoken citations, three languages, Urdu braille (live, letters only — like the others, not yet reviewed by a braille teacher), and ingested chapters as .brf braille files, free to download — the .brf files have never been opened on a real display or embosser, so treat them as untested.
Coming next
eBraille editions for multi-line tactile devices — planned; not yet built, and not yet tested on any device. Geometry-true audio figures — hear a figure's actual shape traced in sound. Nine more Indian languages through state-board textbooks. A daily two-minute braille warmup that builds real fluency.
Why this leads
Braille self-learning devices have proved this demand in India — in dedicated hardware costing real money per student. Multi-line tactile displays are transforming classrooms abroad at thousands of dollars each. Suno Dost is the other path: research-informed learning, as free software on the phone a family already owns — built to answer from the student's own textbook, and to say so plainly when it cannot. We have not benchmarked that against a general chatbot, so we do not claim to beat one.
The technology behind this — a trust boundary in which every audible sentence is constructed from a passage we retrieved, so an unsourced payload is refused rather than spoken; the voice math workspace; touch-explorable figures; and the eyes-free camera flow — is the subject of a pending U.S. patent application (2026). That constrains what can be SAID; it does not make choosing the right passage, or reading it correctly, impossible to get wrong — an independent review in September 2026 found both failing, and they are named on our accessibility page. Suno Dost stays free for students; the patent protects the work so it can. A pending application is not a finding of novelty.
Design informed by published work. These inspired how Suno Dost is built; none of them is a study of Suno Dost itself, and we have not published one:
V-Braille (Univ. of Washington, ACM ASSETS 2010) ·
Standard Bharati Braille Codes (NIEPVD, Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment) — we follow the 2025 publication; NIEPVD now lists edition 2.1 dated 20 July 2026, which we have not yet assessed ·
the Monarch multi-line tactile display (APH / HumanWare) ·
braille-literacy resources (National Federation of the Blind).
On your phone in one minute — no app store needed
Suno Dost is a modern web app: it installs straight from the browser onto the home screen, with its own icon, full-screen — and it is always the latest version. Nothing to download from a store, nothing to update.
iPhone / iPad
Open sunodost.org/app in Safari → tap the Share button → Add to Home Screen. Voice input on iPhone works in Safari (enable Siri & Dictation in Settings if asked).
Android
Open sunodost.org/app in Chrome → tap the ⋮ menu → Add to Home screen (or tap the Install banner). Works with TalkBack.
Computer
Just open sunodost.org/app in Chrome or Edge and start talking — or type your questions instead.
Free to use, with a daily limit while we are small: 25 questions per visitor per day and 600 across all visitors per day, both reset at midnight UTC. The per-visitor count is by internet address, so a school whose devices share one connection shares one allowance — tell us and we will lift it. Pilot schools, teachers and families get access without the limit: write to us with a line about your school or student.
Built for students. Looking for partners.
Suno Dost was founded by Chandrashekhar Sattiraju and is self-funded. It is free for blind students and always will be — there is nothing to buy, no data sold, no advertisements, just a conviction that a blind student in a government school deserves the same patient, brilliant tutor as anyone else. Our intent is to make Suno Dost a nonprofit, so it stays that way.
We are beginning pilots with schools and teachers of blind students. If you are an educator, an accessibility organisation, a state board, or a parent who wants this for your child — we would love to hear from you.
Teach with us. Test with us. Dream with us.
Write a few lines about your school or your student, and we will get you started.
Write to usNo mail app? Our address is shekhar.sattiraju@gmail.com — copy it into whatever you use.