ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Rakuten Viber works to provide its services on the tech market in Kurdish, a vice president of the popular communications application told Rudaw, saying that their work is an appreciation for their Kurdish users.
“We are heavily working with our tech partners to make sure that the services that we launch on the market will also support Kurdish in an accelerated time frame,” Atanas Raykov, Vice President of Growth and Key Markets at Rakuten Viber told Rudaw’s Mohammed Sheikh Fatih.
Raykov said Viber allocated resources to fully support the Kurdish language to achieve “a full localization of the app in Kurdish” so that all the application’s menus and settings are adapted in the Kurdish language.
“This was a very important milestone for us. This was a way also to show our gratitude for the loyalty of Kurdish users, and to show the fact that we appreciate differences,” Raykov said.
Raykov said that his company has had a long-standing partnership with Rudaw for several years now, and expressed their satisfaction with Rudaw’s involvement on the platform.
“There are a lot of different new products and new features that we are preparing, so we will be very happy to integrate it with Rudaw given its leadership position,” he said.
Regarding the privacy and safety of Viber, Raykov affirmed that “without any doubt” all the messages, calls, and voice messages of the users are end-to-end encrypted. “This is a fact of Viber for many years now, for seven years, and we have never ever made any compromise about this technology,” he said.
Viber, also known as Rakuten Viber, is a cross-platform voice-over IP and instant messaging software application owned by the Japanese multinational company Rakuten. It instantly became popular inside the Kurdistan Region and Iraq with the spread of internet connection across the country. Millions of Iraqi and Kurdish citizens now use Viber for their daily communication needs.
