ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage

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imagine being within
a phone call’s reach
from the ability
to post, scan, and
respond to email and
instant messages
—without typing.

For the developing world—perhaps, one day, a village school might “bid” for cheaper electricity cycles—and the solar cells of a neighboring village might provide them.

People will talk to the Web…and it will talk back. People will be able to use the Internet through natural voice interaction—eliminating the need for visuals or keypads. New technology will change how people create, build, and interact with information and e-commerce Web sites—using speech instead of text. We know this can happen because the technology is available, but we also know it can happen because it must. In places like India, where the spoken word is more prominent than the written word in education, government, and culture, “talking” to the Web is leapfrogging all other interfaces, and the mobile phone is outpacing the PC.

Researchers creating the “spoken Web” will enable people without traditional access to the Internet, but with access to a mobile or landline phone, to gain access to a worldwide collection of “voice sites”: Web sites accessible by voice commands over a telephone network. It particularly helps people who are not able to read or write, the elderly, and the economically disadvantaged. It has enormous potential, for example, for providing ways that village communities can offer their products and services worldwide using a voice-enabled Web portal.

Imagine adding to the spoken Web advances in language translation, speech recognition, and speech synthesis. During the Beijing Olympics, visitors could use a modified mobile

device in a novel way: they could speak their destination and the machine would recognize, translate, and synthesize the Mandarin equivalent for their taxi driver. U.S. soldiers in Iraq have pi-lot-tested handheld translators to take spoken English and produce spoken Arabic, or vice versa.

And once the Web is more accessible by using voice, it will become easier to use for everyone. Imagine being within a phone call’s reach from the ability to post, scan, and respond to email and instant messages—without typing. Think of being able to search the Web verbally and have the information read back to you, just as if it were an actual conversation.

 

conclusion

These are speculations, not guarantees. And they are selections, taken from the broad universe of technology advances. But they might illuminate two important things I hope we can achieve. Of one I am pretty sure—the world will continue to become more interconnected, instrumented, and intelligent. Of the other: well, who needs to benefit the most from those attributes? If we have learned anything from recent trials, it is that the big problems of the world are intimately intertwined. Climate change knows no borders; shifting demographics affect us all, one way or another; and we all suffer when the poorest suffer. So my conjecture is that these elements of the increasingly connected world will enable those in the poorest nations to participate in ways they have not experienced before.

But to use those capabilities responsibly and effectively, we will need creativity—to conceive of the new solutions we can build for the developing world as much as for the developed; collaboration—to break down the boundaries that inhibit change, and to leverage the minds and skills of the many; and courage—to move beyond current business models to drive desirable change.

 

Mark Cleverley ( [e-mail]) is a solutions executive with IBM Global Government Industry.

The writer’s views are his own—though not exclusively— and do not necessarily represent the views of IBM Corporation.