During a transit night in Dubai, entrepreneur Pratik Ghosh was narrating the story of Vishnu’s chakra to his friend’s young son in their living room; as his friend captured the moment on his phone, Ghosh realised how important stories are to our own narratives. “JUSTORI was born precisely at 19:18:41 hours on 24 September 2016. The journey of JUSTORI began - to become the home for digital narration where anyone from anywhere in the world can just pick up a smartphone to tell a story as easily as I told my story to my young friend,” Ghosh reveals. The incredibly user-friendly smartphone app was born out of Ghosh’s love for traditional storytelling, but he insists at the core of the platform lies the need for the democratisation of voices. “Anyone can pick up a phone, and on Justori they can share a speech, be it a minute-long or an hour long, or you can hold a podcast or a conversation. The idea centres around freedom of speech in its truest form; anybody with a talent or a story to tell can produce, narrate, direct, recite without any hindrance, from anywhere in the world,” Ghosh tells us.
Though based in France, the entrepreneur has a dedicated team of developers in the country who are working to hone the app further; but in just a few years, Justori has garnered the interest of people across the world. Podcast culture has of course, taken over the whole world, but Justori is perhaps the layman podcaster’s best friend in the realm of audio streaming, like a radio station in your palm. On the Justori app, we came across a diverse smorgasbord of stories, ranging from personal to fantastical, from accounts of struggle to success stories. But funnily enough, Ghosh didn’t fathom how relevant his app would turn out to be in the streaming age. “The app was born quite spontaneously, and I never really conceived it like the home of podcasting like it turned out to be. You can share something and it can stimulate or inspire a total stranger!” Ghosh remarks. With Justori you can record family history, autobiographies, anecdotes by friends, make audio travel blogs, promote your writing, poetry and acapella to a global audience, preserve languages or oral traditions and informal knowledge networks, hone voice skills, elocution and presentation skills, or even use it for offline listening, auto-tuning, voice notes.
Ghosh, who is originally a business consultant and international banker, reveals that many users from Kolkata have reached out to him to appreciate the incredible app. Needless to say, Justori enjoys a diverse league of users and listeners. “There are literally children who are reciting their nursery rhymes, there are people who are let’s say over 90, chronicling the age they have lived through, talking about their life, their work. There are many young people across the world who use the app for table-read or other audio projects, it’s really for everybody,” we are told.