When Sohaj Singh Brar opens the Simran screen on his phone, he sees a globe. Small pointsof light pulse across it: one in Toronto, a cluster near Amritsar, and a lone dot somewhereinthe middle of Australia. Each light is a person doing Naam Simran at that exact moment. Theapp tells you how many: "127 souls meditating now."
He built that app over the course of a year, working on nights and weekends.
By day, Sohaj is a Product Designer at Meta, where he leads design on WhatsApp Businessand has spent the last decade building digital tools used by hundreds of millions of people. He has won the Red Dot Design Concept Award. His work has been covered by TechCrunch, Fast Company, and AdWeek.
But Sikh AI generates no revenue. It has no ads. It costs nothing to download. It was built entirely in Sohaj's personal time, on his own, as seva.
"I've spent 11 years learning how to build things that people love," he says. "I wanted tousethat skill for the Sangat, free of cost."
Sikh AI launched on January 21, 2026. In the first thirty days, 9,600 people downloaded it. ByOctober, that number had crossed 50,000 without a team or additional support.
The app includes daily Hukamnama from Sri Harmandir Sahib, complete Nitnemwith audioand Gurmukhi text, and ChardiKala AI, a spiritual companion that answers questions about Gurbani, Sikh history, and daily practice in English, Punjabi, and Hindi. Sohaj named theAI after the principle he has returned to most often in his own life.
But the feature that surprised even him is the Simran Globe.
"I wanted diaspora Sikhs to feel what it's like to pray together, even when they're thousandsof miles from the nearest Gurdwara," he says. "When you open that screen and see someonemeditating in Australia and someone in Toronto and someone in Punjab, all at the samemoment, something shifts."
The reviews suggest the Sangat has felt it. Jenna, a new Sikh just starting out who doesn't yet know Punjabi or Gurmukhi, wrote: "I'm so glad I found this app — I really appreciate havingit to guide me." Khushi wrote that even when her phone was low on storage, she couldn't bringherself to delete it. "Today I opened it to check what this application actually offers and honestly, this is truly amazing, most importantly the Simran feature. Now I understood it wasalways Guru Sahib Ji who didn't let me uninstall it, because he knew it would be worthusing." Ayaan, another young user, put it simply: "really got me into sikhi."
Sohaj grew up in India, earned a top-ranking spot in the IIT-JEE (one of the world's most competitive engineering exams), and came to the United States for graduate school at California College of the Arts. He has lived and worked in San Francisco for over a decade. Like many in the diaspora, he has spent years navigating the distance between the culturehecame from and the country he built his career in.
Sikh AI, he says, is his attempt to close that distance, not for himself, but for the next generation.
"There are young Sikhs who have never been to Punjab, who are searching for somethingand don't know where to look," he says. "If this app is there when they go looking, if ChardiKala AI can answer their question at 2 in the morning when no one else can, thenit was worth every night I spent building it."
Sikh AI is free and available now on Android.
Download Sikh AI: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.anhadapp