Who makes PopPond
PopPond is built by one person in the United Arab Emirates. Here is who, and how the recordings inside it were made.
A project, not a company
PopPond is a project. Waseem Sayegh builds it alone from the UAE, and all of it fits on one desk. He writes the code, edits the audio, cuts the photographs out one at a time, and answers the support email himself.
The years before this were spent on platforms built for hundreds of millions of people. He was general manager of TikTok LIVE across the Middle East and North Africa, and before that he worked at Google in Dubai. What he wanted to make afterward was smaller and more particular. Something for a child on a video call who understands their grandmother and cannot answer her, in the words that house actually uses. Everything on this site and in the app comes from that one desk, and when something is wrong there is one person to tell. The support page reaches him directly.
Where it came from
In 2016 he built an app called Alef, a picture-and-audio vocabulary app for Arabic. It found a small, loyal audience of parents. Over the years the tools it was built with aged out from under it, and rebuilding became the only honest option.
PopPond is that rebuild, written from scratch. One thing carried over: the original recordings. Those were made by native speakers a decade ago, they were good then, and they are the same voices you hear in the app today.
How the recordings are made
Each dialect is recorded by a speaker of that dialect. Not one voice actor performing an accent, and no synthesis. Where a dialect has no recording of its own for a word, the app plays Standard Arabic and says so, and this site never shows a shared file under two different flags. Every card is a photograph of the real thing, cut out on a plain background, so a cat is a cat.
What it does not do
PopPond has no ads, no accounts and no sign-up. It works with the plane in airplane mode and the phone out of signal. There is nothing to log into. Ten books come with the app, and the rest can be added one at a time.
Seven dialects. One app.
Every word photographed and recorded by a native speaker, in all seven.