THE internet, wonderful though it is, reinforces one of life’s fundamental divisions: that between the literate and the illiterate. Most websites, even those heavy with video content, rely on their users being able to read and—if interactive—write. Building your own site certainly does.
Guruduth Banavar, the director of IBM’s India Research Laboratory, wanted to allow people who struggle with literacy to create websites. So he and his colleagues have devised a system based on what is known as “voice extensible markup language”, a cousin of the hypertext markup language used on conventional websites, that allows a website to be built and operated more or less by voice alone.
The “spoken web” Dr Banavar hopes to conjure into existence will be based on mobile phones, which are already proving an effective alternative to computers for obtaining information online in poor countries. As well as making voice calls, people can text one another and, if their phones are up to the job, get access to the web. Across the developing world there are a number of successful banking and money-transfer services that rely on mobile phones rather than computers.
Dr Banavar, however, thinks mobiles could be made to work much harder. His voice sites are hosted on standard computer servers and behave much like conventional websites. At their most basic they are designed for local use, acting as portals through which people can find out such things as when the mobile hospital will next visit their village, the price of rice in the local market and which wells they should use for irrigation. Instead of typing in a web address, the user rings the website up. Then, with a combination of voice commands and key presses, he navigates through a spoken list of topics and listens to subjects of interest.
That is useful, but not startlingly different from the sort of call-centre hell familiar to anyone who has tried to get information out of a large company by telephone. What makes Dr Banavar’s approach different is that, by selecting an appropriate option with the handset, the user can add content to a voice site by recording a comment that is then made available to others. This can then be accessed as one of the “latest additions” or “most listened to” items in a spoken sub-menu. More important still, though, is that people can use a mobile phone to build their own voice sites—a process that, in trials conducted by the laboratory, even a non-expert could learn in as little as ten minutes.
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