03 — how the compression works
It guesses the next letter, so the letter costs less.
- 1A small Bangla model rides inside the app. No internet, no server.
- 2It predicts each next letter. Cost equals surprise — an expected letter is nearly free to record; only surprises cost.
- 3The bits go out as characters SMS treats as cheap.
আমরা পাঁচজন নিরাপদ আছি, ঢাকা
Bù8P9*+=!¤1+1j
731 characters → 3 texts, not 11
04 — tab one: Normal
Type Bangla. Send it. Read it back.
- →Send opens your own SMS app, number and message filled in.
- →It stays off until a real number is there — a text link with no number silently fails.
- ←Paste the whole message you received. It finds the code, ignores the signature and the map link.
- ⇥Anything shared into the app from elsewhere lands in the decode box.
Try it: 01315267528
05 — tab two: Emergency
A survivor has no app. So this tab sends words.
- ✍What is happening, in your own words.
- ☑One of 32 ready sentences, with a blank to fill.
- 📍A district, or your live location.
- ⏱How long ago.
- ☎999 and eight more, one tap to call — these are call centres, so calling is the reliable path. Calls need no internet.
It refuses to send until those are answered — a report with no place is not a report.
06 — tab three: Relay
Forty families. One message.
- +Each household is added with one tap from the Emergency tab.
- =They go out together, with one signature for the batch.
- △A counter shows what sending them one by one would have cost.
Two households → one message
Who it is for: a shelter volunteer or ward coordinator — one person speaking for many. Not for your own single message; that is the Emergency tab. When towers are jammed, one message that gets through beats forty in a queue.
07 — measured, not claimed
5,000 messages the model had never seen.
| Bangla in one text | Fits in one | |
|---|---|---|
| Bornomala | 361 | 100.0% |
| Every phone today | 70 | 98.2% |
| gzip | 53 | 99.5% |
5.15× more Bangla per text
Ordinary compression does worse than doing nothing — it has no idea what Bangla looks like, and a message this short never repays the overhead.
08 — graceful degradation
Each layer below has a floor.
No internetinstall it once and it opens forever after, with no connection
No mobile datatexts and calls still go, over 2G
No GPSpick your district instead of using live location
No network at allshow the QR and let the phone beside you photograph it — for handing a report to a rescue team, or to someone walking out to coverage
Your location always travels twice — as a map link and as plain numbers beside it — because the numbers still make sense on a phone that cannot open the link.
No accounts, no tracking, no ads, nothing sent to us. The app is 92 kB and the model a separate 1.7 MB, so Emergency and Relay work before it finishes loading.
09 — running on real phones
Installed, sent, received — on two Android handsets.
Live at mayamoho.github.io/bornomala · bilingual, switchable mid-message · 81 automated checks across three suites · MIT licensed, with the benchmark and the model training tools in the repo.