#AI4Good started as a dare to myself: can I use AI to build and ship something genuinely useful — for kids, for health, for our culture — one build at a time? Eighteen days later there were eight live apps, each free, each on GitHub Pages. This is the story of how they came to be, in the order they were born — and each has its own deep-dive post on the AI4Good blog.
I'm Naveen Gopalakrishna — an AI Global Black Belt at Microsoft by day, a compulsive builder by night. The tooling that made this pace possible was GitHub Copilot CLI in autopilot mode (the agent researches, writes code, runs builds, and renders assets autonomously) on top of Azure AI — gpt-image-2 for art, Azure Speech for narration, and open models from Hugging Face for the heavy lifting. But tools are just tools. The thread that ties these eight together is a question I kept asking: who does this help?
Let's walk the timeline.
Jun 22 — PrimeBeats: your music, beautifully local
Where it started. PrimeBeats is an Amazon-Prime-Music-style player for the songs already on your phone — background playback, lock-screen controls, playlists, an on-device Smart Radio, and a real equalizer. No account, no ads, 100% offline. Built with React Native + Expo.
The good: ownership and privacy — your music, zero data, zero tracking, zero cost.
Jun 23 — ActionCut: put a pro video studio in everyone's pocket
The next build set the tone: take something normally locked behind subscriptions and make it free and open. ActionCut is a CapCut-class Android video editor — a real multi-track timeline, LUT color filters, GPU effects, audio mixing, and one-tap export presets for every platform. Built in Kotlin + Jetpack Compose + Media3.
The good: creators on entry-level Android phones get studio-grade editing without a paywall or a watermark. Storytelling shouldn't require a subscription.
Jun 26 — KidKat: only the good stuff, for curious kids
This is the app that named the whole campaign. KidKat plays a finite, parent-approved stream of short educational videos — inside the official YouTube player, using the official Data API, fully ToS-compliant. No infinite feed. No algorithmic rabbit holes. No doomscroll. A parent allowlist decides what's on the menu. Built with Flutter for Android and iOS.
The good: it turns the most anxiety-inducing part of modern parenting — handing a child a screen — into something calm and intentional. AI for good starts with protecting the youngest users.
Jun 27 — NeoFit: health that speaks your language
"Sehat, simple banayi." NeoFit is a science-informed Indian health and fitness app in 22 Indian languages — calorie tracking that actually knows dosa, biryani, and gulab jamun, on-device food recognition, AI-generated food photos, AI exercise videos, and Health Connect sync. Offline-first, powered by Azure AI, Kotlin/Compose.
The good: most fitness apps assume you eat like the West and read English fluently. NeoFit meets 1.4 billion people where they are — in their language, with their food. Inclusion is a health outcome.
Jul 04 — GpsCamera: proof you can trust
GpsCamera is a fast, native Android camera that burns your exact location and a live mini-map onto every photo, writes standards-compliant GPS EXIF, and files each shot into its own album. Kotlin, Compose, CameraX.
The good: field engineers, insurance surveyors, community reporters, and site inspectors need verifiable, tamper-evident documentation. A trustworthy timestamped-and-geotagged photo is a small tool that quietly protects people.
Jul 05 — The Lamp & the Machine: shadow-puppet theatre as an AI film studio
The Lamp & the Machine turns Karnataka's 500-year-old leather shadow-puppet theatre, Togalu Gombeyaata, into an AI film studio — cinematic scenes from Sora 2, narration from Azure AI, finished with Demucs + FFmpeg, retelling the story of Kempegowda, the founder of Bengaluru.
The good: generative AI as a preservation tool — putting a fading folk art in front of a new generation.
Jul 06 — Sopāna: a Snakes & Ladders that teaches
Sopāna reclaims the game the West calls Snakes & Ladders and restores its origin — the ancient Indian Moksha Patam, where every snake is a vice and every ladder a virtue. Land on one and the game animates and reads its meaning aloud. Play three ways (a 2D board, a 2.5D cinematic mode, and a 3D camera), across four worlds, with up to four players on one screen. A web PWA plus an Android APK.
The good: it turns a children's game back into what it was designed to be — a gentle lesson in ethics and consequence, wrapped in cultural heritage. AI narration and art make an 800-year-old teaching tool feel alive again.
Jul 09 — Chaturanga: ancient chess, reborn in glowing 3D
Chaturanga is the ancient Indian "game of the four divisions," played with modern chess rules but authentic piece identities — Raja, Mantri, Gaja, Ashva, Ratha, Padati — carved in real-time glowing 3D. It ships with a teaching AI (five levels), a coach that reviews your blunders, an openings trainer, a rotating piece inspector, and a Warrior's Eye camera. Four worlds, each teaching a moral lesson.
The pieces themselves are an AI-for-good story: I generated each one from a single concept image using a free Hugging Face Space and headless Blender — the full image-to-3D pipeline is its own post here.
The good: a free, offline, no-sign-in chess tutor that also carries culture — learning and heritage in one board.
What #AI4Good actually means
Look at all eight together and a pattern appears — not "AI apps," but apps that use AI to do something good:
| Day | App | Who it serves | The good |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 22 | PrimeBeats | Listeners | Own your music — offline, ad-free |
| Jun 23 | ActionCut | Creators | Studio-grade editing, free |
| Jun 26 | KidKat | Kids & parents | Safe, finite, educational screen time |
| Jun 27 | NeoFit | 1.4B Indians | Health in 22 languages |
| Jul 04 | GpsCamera | Field workers | Verifiable documentation |
| Jul 05 | The Lamp & the Machine | Culture | Preserving a folk art with AI |
| Jul 06 | Sopāna | Families | Values + heritage, playfully |
| Jul 09 | Chaturanga | Learners | Free chess tutor + culture |
The method: one build at a time, from a single laptop, with Copilot CLI autopilot doing the heavy lifting and Azure AI + Hugging Face models supplying the intelligence. The mission: put that capability toward education, health, culture, and trust — and give it away.
This is just the beginning of the campaign. Next up the runway: Indian Tales, a multilingual Togalu Gombe (shadow-puppet) storytelling app to keep a fading folk art alive.
If you build things, I'd gently challenge you to the same dare: pick the "who does this help?" first, then let AI help you ship it. That's #AI4Good.
Follow the journey — GitHub · LinkedIn. Built one day at a time.
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