Rawi Quran companion · iOS

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Rawi (راوي) listens to Quranic recitation and tells you exactly which ayah you’re hearing — like Shazam, but for the Quran. You tap once, it transcribes the recitation on-device, and the ayah appears with its translation and tafsir. No audio leaves the phone.

I designed it, wrote the Swift, trained the machine-learning models, and did the marketing. It’s the clearest expression of how I work now: not handing off a design, but building the whole thing.

Why I built it

I’m a Muslim with Turkish roots. I learned to read and recite the Quran young, but I never fully learned classical Arabic. I could say the words without always knowing which ayah I was hearing, or what it meant in the moment it moved me.

Rawi closes that gap. You hear a recitation that stops you — now you know which ayah it is, and you can sit with its meaning. That’s the whole product in one sentence.

The key decision: recognition, not fingerprinting

Shazam matches a recording against a fingerprint database, so it only knows songs it has already indexed. That approach can’t work for the Quran — every reciter, every masjid, every voice is different.

So Rawi doesn’t fingerprint. It does real Arabic speech-to-text on-device — a fine-tuned Whisper model (via WhisperKit) transcribes what it hears, and a matching pipeline finds the ayah among all 6,236 in the Quran, usually in under three seconds. Because it reads the words, it works with any reciter — a world-famous qari or the imam down the street — and even with audio playing from another app, like a reel you’re watching.

What’s inside

• Instant, private identification. On-device transcription plus a hybrid text-and- acoustic matcher. Audio is never stored or sent anywhere. No account, no tracking, no ads.
• Identify from anything. A Dynamic Island Live Activity keeps listening while you watch a video or scroll a reel, then reveals the ayah when you tap back.
• The whole Quran to read and search. A full reader in Uthmani script, and search that works by meaning — ask for ayahs about patience and get them, ranked.
• Muqri — test your hifz. Rawi plays the start of an ayah; you recite the continuation by heart; it tells you if you got it right, and tracks where you stumble.
• Depth for those who want it. Eight reciters, translations in eleven languages, nine tafsir commentaries — free to start, with a one-time purchase for the full set.

What it took

Building Rawi meant being designer, engineer, and ML practitioner at once: a SwiftUI app with a dark, manuscript-inspired design system (gold reserved only for the sacred text); a real-time audio pipeline with a voting window for stable matches; and an embedding model I trained to recognize recitation across reciters. The hard parts weren’t any one discipline — they were the seams between them.

Rawi is live on the App Store and still growing. It’s the project I point to when I say I build products.