Audio internet

I just posted this using my other email address, which was not 
recognised by the list. Apologies if it gets duplicated, but I think it 
will interest a lot of people.

-- 
Regards
Jane

_______________________________
Jane Teather
JET Documentation Services
54A Ferme Park Road
London
N4 4ED

tel: +44 (0) 20 8348 9213
mobile: +44 7967 366 252
[email protected]

Fellow of the Communication Research Institute
http://www.communication.org.au 


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*From issue 2679 of New Scientist magazine, 24 October 2008, page 22-23
by Anil Ananthaswamy*

ON A cold winter's day in December 2006, Guruduth Banavar's team 
gathered up some workers at a bustling marketplace in New Delhi, India, 
and cajoled them, each in turn, into a car.

The team was from the IBM India Research Laboratory (IRL) in New Dehli. 
They had come to the market to test an alternative to the internet for 
India's rural population. The system is based on the cellphone, though, 
and so the din of hawkers selling vegetables, and shoppers looking for 
everything from jewellery to electronics, made conversation impossible.

Once inside the car, however, 10 of the 12 volunteers - who had never 
before interacted with a speaking computer - were able to create their 
own voice-based website, or VoiceSite, in just under 4 minutes apiece. 
The first trial of the "spoken web" was a success.

The spoken web is an attempt to bring the power of the internet to rural 
India. Despite India's highly touted knowledge economy, around 70 per 
cent of its billion-strong population lives outside its cities, and most 
of them earn just $4 per day or less. And even for those who can afford 
computers, attempting to access the internet remains a futile exercise, 
either because they cannot read or write or the information on the web 
is simply not relevant to them.

The answer, says Tapan Parikh of the University of California, Berkeley, 
is speech. "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."

"While a farmer may not be able to write about his work, he can easily 
talk about it"

Nearly 300 million people now use cellphones in India, up from zero a 
little more than a decade ago. Their use has spread to semi-urban and 
rural areas, and about 8 million new subscribers sign up each month. "In 
most cases [they] use very low-end mobile phones, not iPhones and 
BlackBerrys," says Banavar, director of IBM IRL. "So 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?"

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. "They would rather call a 
friend to find another person's phone number than actually save the 
number in their address book," says Banavar.

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.

Conceptually, the spoken web is a network of VoiceSites, just as the 
internet is a network of websites. A VoiceSite can only be accessed by a 
phone, and only requires the user to be able to speak and listen. 
Callers can create their own VoiceSites or access those of others. They 
can also surf the spoken web, jumping from VoiceSite to VoiceSite using 
speech.

In developing the system, the team took their cues from the growth of 
the internet. "The thing that really fuelled the adoption of the World 
Wide Web is the ease with which you can create websites," says IBM IRL's 
Amit Nanavati. So they focused on developing a simple way to create 
VoiceSites.

Say a plumber wants new customers. First he calls a number and software 
called VoiGen then guides him, in his local language, through the 
process of setting up a VoiceSite. Relevant information, such as a 
welcome greeting and the plumber's contact details are recorded. Behind 
the scenes, the VoiGen system then creates a VoiceSite. A phone number, 
analogous to a URL, is then assigned to the plumber.

Anyone who calls the plumber's VoiceSite number is greeted with his 
welcome message, and then given help to navigate the information. For 
example, the caller can say "address" to hear the plumber's address, or 
"appointment" to request a call-out with him.

The way a caller navigates the VoiceSite is based on a template, and the 
team has created templates for different types of site, such as 
advertising wares or conducting an auction.

A caller's experience of an individual VoiceSite is similar to the 
interactive voice response (IVR) systems that customers encounter when 
calling, say, an airline or their bank.

However, where the spoken web differs from these systems is that 
different VoiceSites can be linked, just like in the internet. To create 
links, VoiGen prompts the user at predetermined points to provide the 
phone number and a brief description of related VoiceSites - of a 
friend's hardware store, say. Then, a caller to the plumber's site who 
chooses to listen to the plumber's recommended links will hear the 
description and can press a key or say a word to be transferred to the 
hardware store's VoiceSite. "This takes you beyond the IVR stuff," says 
Nanavati (see "Go with the audio flow") 
<http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/mg20026796.500-cellphones-could-be-used-to-build-audio-internet.html#bx267965B1>. 


To manage these transfers, IBM has developed a new protocol, hyperspeech 
transfer protocol (HSTP), which is analogous to the hypertext transfer 
protocol (HTTP) that takes people from one website to another.

Banavar says the team avoided the use of complex voice recognition 
software. "Imagine India, with the number of languages, dialects and 
number of different demographics... Forget it, we would never be able to 
address it," he says. Instead, the spoken web relies on a very small 
vocabulary and the structured interaction means the system always knows 
the context of the spoken words.

Preliminary studies of the system have already thrown up some surprises. 
"Once you give people the capability to start putting information on 
these sites, their imagination starts running quite wild," says Banavar. 
For instance, people wanted to use VoiceSites for matchmaking, or for 
negative advertising - asking callers not to believe the information on 
another VoiceSite, he says.

Despite such unexpected usage, Banavar thinks that the spoken web will 
serve local communities well. For instance, an electrician who cannot 
afford his own storefront can use a VoiceSite to attract customers and 
set up appointments, and so not miss out on business when he is out 
working; villagers can check a VoiceSite to find out if the mobile 
hospital is coming to their village on any given day; a farmer could set 
up a VoiceSite to sell his daily produce to anyone within a 50-kilometre 
radius. "The farmer can get the best price, as opposed to the current 
model, where they have one broker who does everything the way he likes. 
The broker maximises his profits and the farmer is left in the dirt," 
says Banavar.

Parikh of UC Berkeley, who has been working with the IBM team, is using 
the spoken web technology for a pilot project in the state of Gujarat in 
western India. The local radio station archives its content on a 
VoiceSite, which villagers can access and leave comments on. Others can 
listen to these comments, and future broadcasts incorporate them into 
their discussion. "We are using the spoken web tool to make community 
radio more interactive," says Parikh.

With increasing cellphone coverage, a technology like the spoken web 
could prove to be a valuable resource for the developing world, he says. 
"Conventional approaches have only looked at taking the existing web and 
making it available on mobile devices," he says. "This is an opportunity 
for making an entirely new kind of web."

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