big trends

INTERNET SERVICES LIKE social media, online discussion forums, and crowdsourcing marketplaces have transformed how people participate in the information ecology and digital economy. These services empower mostly urban, affluent, and literate people, and improve their reach to information and instrumental needs. However, these services currently exclude billions of people worldwide who are too poor to afford Internet-enabled devices, too remote to access the Internet, or too low literate to navigate the mostly text-driven Internet.

In India and Pakistan alone, there are nearly

1. 1 billion people offline. Although 70% of their populations have access to mobile phones, most people still use basic or feature phones, making it difficult to extend existing Internet services on these devices running custom operating systems. Even when people can afford smartphones and the Internet,

literacy barriers prevent 26% of adults in India and 42% of adults in Pakistan from using text-based interfaces. Most South Asian languages and dialects are still unsupported by the advancements in natural language processing ruling out the use of voice interfaces like Siri and Alexa.

In light of these constraints, Human-Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D) researchers and practitioners have used interactive voice response (IVR) technology to create voice-based services that overcome connectivity barriers by using ordinary phone calls, literacy barriers by using local language speaking and listening skills, and socioeconomic barriers by using toll-free (1-800) lines. These services let users call a phone number to record and listen to voice messages in their local languages. Because of their accessible and usable design, these services have found applications in diverse domains and have profoundly impacted marginalized communities in low-resource environments. This article follows the evolution of these services over the last two decades (see the accompanying figure), and their big challenges and new frontiers.

 

First Wave: Access and Inclusion The first wave of voice-based services focused on improving information access for people in low-resource communities. For example, HealthLine enabled low-literate frontline health workers in Pakistan to retrieve relevant information by speaking out predefined commands. 6 While initial efforts like HealthLine allowed users to only consume information, subsequent services took the form of voice forums and enabled marginalized communities to also produce and share information. This included Avaaj Otalo (an agriculture discussion forum in India), 3 CGNet Swara (a citizen journalism service in India), 2 MobileVaani (a social media service in India), Ila Dhageyso (a civic engagement portal in Somaliland), 1 and IBM’s Spoken Web (a user-generated

DOI: 10.1145/3343452

BY ADITYA VASHISTHA, UMAR SAIF,
AND AGHA ALI RAZA
The
Internet of
the Orals