tion and get community support.

Moreover, they demonstrated that a community of low-income, low-literate people can moderate themselves without any outside support, thereby addressing the content management challenge of these voice forums.

The second key challenge in scaling voice forums is the airtime cost.

Often, these services use expensive toll-free lines to remain accessible to low-income users. The resultant cost poses a huge burden to sustainability, often putting these services at risk of being shut down as the usage grows. While a few services sustain themselves through advertisements, grants, and partnerships with telecoms or governments, these options are often beyond the reach of most voice forum providers. To make these services financially sustainable, Vashistha et al. examined whether low-income users of voice forums could complete useful work on their mobile phones to offset their participation costs. In 2016, they created Respeak, the first voice-based crowdsourcing marketplace that pays users to transcribe audio files vocally. 7–9

Respeak sends short audio segments to multiple voice forum users and pays them via mobile airtime for each submitted transcript. Instead of typing the transcript, users respeak audio content into an off-the-shelf speech recognition engine and submit the autogenerated transcript.

Respeak combines the transcripts for
each segment from multiple users us-
ing sequence-alignment algorithms
to reduce random speech recognition
errors. It then pays users in mobile
airtime based on the accuracy of
transcripts submitted in them. In the
last three years, Respeak has been
used by low-income students, blind
people, and rural residents in India to
produce speech transcriptions with
over 90% accuracy at one-fourth of
the market rate, generating sufficient
profit to subsidize their participation
costs. One minute of crowd work on
Respeak enable users to earn eight
minutes of airtime. 8

Grand Challenges: Harassment, Misinformation, and Disinformation Voice forums, like any other social platform, come with their own pitfalls. They end up reflecting the existing sociocultural norms and values of the society, including its shortcomings and biases. For example, while Swara and Baang served as instruments of inclusion for low literate, rural, indigenous, and visually impaired communities, they failed to create a welcoming environment for female users. 11 Women faced systemic discrimination and harassment in the form of messages that contained abuses, threats, and flirtatious behavior.

Both mainstream social media platforms and voice forums face grand challenges when tackling misinformation, disinformation, harassment, and abuse. These platforms and forums differ greatly in terms of scale, features, interfaces, supported languages, and target users. Consequently, solutions to tackle these challenges on a

Three waves of voice forums in low-resource environments.

2007 2011 2015 2019

Access and Inclusion

• HealthLine
• Avaaj Otalo
• CGNet Swara
• MobileVaani
• Spoken Web
• Ila Dhageyso

Training and Spread

• Polly
• Polly-Santé
• Sangeet Swara
• Baang
• Respeak and similar systems

Managing Content and Costs
platform like Facebook might be inef-
fective for voice forums, and vice versa.
This presents interesting research
challenges of identifying indecorous
content in local language audio, filter-
ing out spreaders of disinformation,
and addressing situations where the
collective ignorance of community
members eclipse their collective intel-
ligence. The HCI4D community must
tackle these grand challenges to make
the Internet of the orals more diverse,
inclusive, and impactful.

References

1. Gulaid, M. and Vashistha, A. Ila Dhageyso: An interactive voice forum to foster transparent governance in Somaliland. In Proceedings of the

6th Intern. Conf. Information and Communications Technologies and Development: Notes, Vol. 2 (Cape Town, South Africa, 2013), 41–44.

2. Mudliar, P. et al. Emergent practices around CGNet Swara, voice forum for citizen journalism in rural India. In Proceedings of the 5th Intern. Conf. Information and Communication Technologies and Development (Atlanta, GA, USA, 2012), 159–168.

3. Patel, N. et al. Avaaj Otalo: A field study of an interactive voice forum for small farmers in rural India. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, GA, USA, 2010), 733–742.

4. Raza, A.A. et al. Baang: A viral speech-based social platform for under-connected populations. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montreal, QC, Canada, 2018), 643:1–643: 12.

5. Raza, A.A. et al. Job opportunities through entertainment: Virally spread speech-based services for low-literate users. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems (Paris, France, 2013), 2803–2812.

6. Sherwani, J. et al. Healthline: Speech-based access to health information by low-literate users. Inter. Conf. Information and Communication Technologies and Development (Bangalore, India, 2007), 1–9.

7. Vashistha, A. et al. BSpeak: An accessible voice-based crowdsourcing marketplace for low-income blind people. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montreal, QC, Canada, 2018), 57:1–57: 13.

8. Vashistha, A. et al. ReCall: Crowdsourcing on basic phones to financially sustain voice forums. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems (Glasgow, Scotland, U.K., 2019).

9. Vashistha, A. et al. Respeak: A voice-based, crowd-powered speech transcription system. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems (Denver, CO, USA, 2017), 1855–1866.

10. Vashistha, A. et al. Sangeet Swara: A community-moderated voice forum in rural India. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems (Seoul, South Korea, 2015), 417–426.

11. Vashistha, A. et al. Threats, abuses, flirting, and blackmail: Gender inequity in social media voice forums. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems (Glasgow, Scotland, U. K., 2019).

12. Wolfe, N. et al. Rapid development of public health education systems in low-literacy multilingual environments: Combating Ebola through voice messaging. In Proceedings of the ISCA Special Interest Group on Speech and Language Technology in Education (Leipzig, Germany, 2015).

 

Aditya Vashistha is an assistant professor at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.

Umar Saif is UNESCO Chair, ICTD, Lahore, Pakistan. Agha Ali Raza is an assistant professor at Information Technology University, Lahore, Pakistan.

© 2019 ACM 0001-0792/19/11