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