Voice-based web access in rural Africa

Abstract

Despite its tremendous success, the World Wide Web can still not used by large parts of the world's population. Therefore, many people, especially in rural areas of developing countries, still do not have access to services and information that are available as a result of the World Wide Web. Given the potential of the Web in improving people's lives, a question is how it can be expanded to serve those living in less privileged conditions. Information must then be reachable regardless of infrastructure, allowing access using also interfaces such as radio and mobile phone. There is widespread use and adoption of radio and mobile telephony in Africa and thus, innovative use of these technologies could help in expanding the reach of the Web. In this paper we present three systems, based on open Web standards, designed and built to fit conditions in remote rural regions in Africa namely, a voice-based (i) trading system, using phone and radio as its interfaces, (ii) a voice-web based interactive news and blogging system and (iii) messaging system. The systems have been developed and have been deployed in Mali. All three systems together showcase the importance that innovation plays in order to make Web technologies relevant in the lives of many rural dwellers in Africa. We show the current status and usage of the systems and discuss how these systems represent our steps into bringing the Web to these contexts.

Let's "Downscale" Linked Data

“…9 Illustrating this approach, the RadioMarché system from the EU-funded project Voices (www.mvoices.eu) lets farmers phone a service to announce what they have to sell and name the price they're asking for it. 10 The server then turns the different price information into a voice communiqué that can be broadcast locally via radio or that clients can listen to on demand when calling a specific number (see Figure 2).…”

Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management

“…Before analysing the specific requirements to Knowledge Technology in a developing context we report on previous research into knowledge sharing case studies in rural, developing regions. For a number of cases, we have already developed and deployed ICTs using a living-labs method [1]. Other cases are currently under development.…”

“…This use case was developed in a livinglabs collaboration between Malian sustenance farmers, radio hosts, a local NGO and CS4D researchers [1]. Local farmers expressed the need to share information about prices and availability of local produce such as honey or cereals.…”

“…This is a more generic platform in the sense that the type of information is less restricted. Local radio hosts manage and access the information using a webinterface or a voice-interface using their mobile phones in a local language [1].…”

“…Voice-based [1] or icon-based interfaces have shown great promise here, especially when combined in multi-modal interfaces. Infrastructure Similarly, the systems should be designed to work with nonstandard infrastructures.…”