The future of computing and communications: random thoughts, part 5

The New Scientist recently published an article entitled "Cell phones could be used to build 'audio Internet'". (I'm not sure if the article requires a subscription to obtain full access, and I apologize if it doesn't, but the link should at least lead to the abstract in that case.) This is one more indicator of the proliferation of modalities for human-computer interaction (HCI) that has been a major theme of my random thoughts in recent months.

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."

Between a quarter and a third of India's one billion-plus population have access to a cell phone, with the number growing at 8 million per month. This is far greater penetration than the World Wide Web in India, especially in semi-rural and rural areas. Moreover, the content of the Web is not useful to India's poor, either (or both) because they cannot read or the content is irrelevant to their daily lives.

So how to leverage cell phone technology to bridge the Digital Divide? The answer posited by the New Scientist article is the spoken web.

...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.

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 vast majority of people on this planet are poor and illiterate, but more and more of these folks are acquiring access to cell phones, partly due to initiatives like GrameenPhone, but mostly due to the fact that cell phone infrastructure is profitable even in developing countries, in turn due in part to compelling economic reasons to want telephone access.

One example: I have read accounts of fishers in Kerala, one of India's poorest states, using cell phones to find out where to get the best price for their catch, eliminating their dependence on a single local bulk buyer. They can learn the price at various ports within sailing distance and mentally compute the tradeoff between the cost of traveling to a given port and the value of their catch at that port. A classic reduction of market friction.

Clay Shirky wrote an acerbic commentary 2002 on the tendency to sentimentalize the "digital divide". In Half The World, Shirky wrote:

Because wireless infrastructure does not require painstaking building-by-building connectivity, nor is it as hampered by state-owned monopolies, it offers a way for a country to increase its telephone penetration extremely quickly. By 2001, there were 25 countries where cell phone users made up between two-thirds and nine-tenths of the connected populace. In these countries, none of them wealthy, a new telecommunications infrastructure was deployed from scratch, during the same years that keynote speakers and commencement invitees were busily and erroneously informing their listeners that half the world had never made a phone call.

This shift suggests that characterizing the "digital divide" in terms of access to broad- and wideband connectivity is naive. The power a cell phone provides to a poor fisherman is impressive, as one can see from this quote from a 2006 Washington Post article:

Rajan said the dealers don't necessarily like the new balance of power, but they are paying better prices to him and thousands of other fishermen who work this lush stretch of coastline. "They are forced to give us more money because there is competition," said Rajan, who estimated that his income has at least tripled to an average of $150 a month since 2000, when cellphones began booming in India. He said he is providing for his family in ways that his fisherman father never could, including a house with electricity and a television.

The spoken web could extend the leverage described by this fisherman to myriad small businesses and to individuals in the general population of the developing world. As with the World Wide Web in its infancy in the early '90's, it is impossible at this point to imagine the potential of the spoken web.

Another question: when high-bandwidth connectivity does reach into regions where the population is largely illiterate, will we see the emergence of an audiovisual web, which could merge the spoken web with multiple visual and audio media? Only time will tell, but the possibilities are not remote: in India a little more than a decade ago there were no cell phones, and Web-enabled multimedia cell phones were a pipe dream. Wherever a cellular network exists now, the potential for a 3G/4G Web-enabled cellular network already exists. Unless a better technology emerges in the interim, an audiovisual web targeted at semi-literate and illiterate population segments seems to me to be inevitable.