Singapore-based technology company Lark Technologies Pte Ltd on Thursday announced that it had made its digital collaboration suite, Lark, available for free in India.

The company is making its tool available for free as people across the country are mandated to follow work from home and remote learning policies owing to the 21-day lockdown.

Lark is an all-in-one collaboration platform with tools such as Messenger, Online Docs and Sheets, Cloud Storage, Calendar, and Video Conferencing.

Lark's free version comes with unlimited video calls, screen sharing, 200GB of cloud storage, online collaborative docs and sheets, a smart calendar, a messenger, unlimited third-party app integrations, and customizable attendance/approval workflows. Lark also has a live-streaming feature for video conferences.

Lark’s Messenger tool lets users create chat groups for up to 5,000 members. It also has other features similar to a social messaging platform such as emoji replies, threaded conversations, and read receipt.

The video-conferencing tool, much like a counterpart of Zoom can allow up to 100 participants, up from Zoom’s 50 for the app’s free version. Lark’s video conferencing also supports inviting external participants.

Lark Docs supports multimedia content, including images, videos, charts apart from group chats and polls. Like documents on Microsoft Office or Google Docs, users can also “Comment” on a particular section of the document. The app also allows third-party applications such as Jira, Asana and Salesforce.

Digital collaboration tools and video-conferencing apps have seen an increased surge in usage amid the lockdown owing to the coronavirus pandemic. Video-conferencing app Zoom has garnered over 200 million users in March, up from its average 10 million users in December 2019.

Companies are offering their remote collaboration tools to pitch in. Zoho, for instance, had offered to provide its remote collaboration tool for free till July 1 with features including video and audio calls, real-time collaboration, and messaging.

Cisco had given 90-day free licenses to non-customers for its online collaboration tool Cisco Webex.

Lark is also extending the service for free to Educational Institutes including, Schools, Colleges and Coaching Classes across India.

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