Web on voice for rural India
A Delhi based team of IBM has tested an alternative to the internet for India's rural population. Based on the cell phone, the new style technology is a network of different VoiceSites helping local communities who cannot read or afford a computer to access relevant information.
A New Delhi-based research team is attempting to bring the power of the web to rural villagers — without computers.
The team from the IBM India Research Laboratory (IRL) is testing a spoken version of the Internet targeted at people who cannot read or afford a computer but have access to a cell phone. In India 300 million people use cell phones, up from zero a decade ago.
Guruduth Banavar, director of the IBM IRL, says this system will help local communities by, for example, allowing farmers to sell their own produce directly without going through a middleman, or enabling an electrician who cannot afford a storefront to attract customers, or allowing villagers to access health information.
"We asked ourselves: how can we enable this vast population to do things on the phone in a manner that does not assume a PC-based internet?"said Banavar.
To answer that question, Banavar and his team interviewed workers across India - including housemaids, milkmen, plumbers, and electricians - to understand their level of technological literacy.
What they found was that while most people used cellphones, they rarely use text messaging or even the address book on their phones.
It was clear that any new internet-style technology for rural India could not be like the web, which is essentially a literacy-dependent visual interface. "That led to the spoken web," says Banavar.
The spoken web is a network of VoiceSites — voice-based websites that people create by calling the number for software named VoiGen.
VoiGen — developed by the IBM team — guides the caller through the process of setting up a VoiceSite, recording relevant information such as contact details, and assigns a telephone number to each site.
Callers to a VoiceSite number can switch from one site to another by pressing a key or saying a word via a new protocol developed by IBM called hyperspeech transfer protocol.
Tapan Parikh from the University of California, Berkeley, who is working with the IBM team on the project, says this is a chance to make "an entirely new kind of web".
"An audio format would provide much more access and opportunity for local people to contribute," he says. "While a farmer may not be able to write a memo, or an email, or a summary of his work, he can easily talk about it”.
