information directory in India). The success of these initial services demonstrated their great potential to enable information access and connectivity among underserved populations in diverse HCI4D contexts. However, the vast majority of these services ran into the hurdles of user training and technology adoption.

Second Wave: Training and Spread

Nearly a decade ago, the biggest road-
blocks to designing voice forums were
usability, motivation, and spread;
target populations faced difficulties
in using even the simplest of speech-
based telephone interfaces, they did
not exhibit interest or trust in using
such services, and it was difficult to
advertise and spread such services to
underconnected people. Research-
ers tried to overcome these barriers
by conducting lab-trainings as well
as door-to-door field campaigns,
but it was quickly realized that these
approaches were not scalable. Raza
et al. used a ludic design approach
to train users and promote usability
and spread. They built Polly, a voice-
based entertainment service that lets
users make a short audio recording,
apply funny voice modifications to
it, and share it with their friends via
automated voice calls. 5 They deployed
Polly to five low-income people in
Pakistan in early 2012. Within a year,
Polly spread virally to over 165,000
users via 636,000 calls without any
outreach efforts. Polly’s ludic inter-
fact design trained users to navigate
IVR interfaces, and also led to its viral
adoption. Raza et al. then used Polly
to share instrumental information
with users to aid their socioeconomic
development. In an initial test, 34,000
Polly users listened to 728 job adver-
tisements nearly 386,000 times within
a year.

Over the last seven years, Polly has been successfully used in multiple countries to rapidly spread useful information to underserved populations. In 2014, at the peak of the Ebola crisis in West Africa, Polly-Santé (Polly-Health) was deployed as an emergency disaster-response service in Guinea to spread reliable information about prevention, symptoms, and cure of Ebola. 12 The information originated from the Centers for Disease Control and the service was funded by the U.S. Embassy in Conakry. One of the hurdles to information dissemination in the Guinean context is great linguistic diversity and the lack of a widely understood

A blind user of Sangeet Swara recording a voice message.