ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage
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seeking to combine the best of
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attention to any aspect of the
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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 ( mark.cleverley@us.ibm.com) 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.