A comparison of mobile money-transfer UIs for non-literate and semi-literate users
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Advancement through interactive radio
Information Systems Frontiers
Avaaj Otalo: a field study of an interactive voice forum for small farmers in rural India
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
HIV health information access using spoken dialogue systems: touchtone vs. speech
ICTD'09 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Information and communication technologies and development
The impact of voice characteristics on user response in an interactive voice response system
Interacting with Computers
Evaluation of IVR data collection UIs for untrained rural users
Proceedings of the First ACM Symposium on Computing for Development
Using ICTs to meet the operational needs of community radio stations in India
Proceedings of the First ACM Symposium on Computing for Development
Emergent practices around CGNet Swara, voice forum for citizen journalism in rural India
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development
Gurgaon idol: a singing competition over community radio and IVRS
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Symposium on Computing for Development
Man versus machine: evaluating IVR versus a live operator for phone surveys in India
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Symposium on Computing for Development
A participatory video and audio platform for community interaction using DVDs and IVR systems
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Symposium on Computing for Development
A case study on the use of IVR systems by visually impaired people
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Symposium on Computing for Development
Exploring the interplay between community media and mobile web in developing regions
Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Human-computer interaction with mobile devices and services
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Community Radio (CR) stations are short range radio stations that serve the local media needs of their surrounding communities. Community participation by way of helping set the station agenda, airing of people's voices, and providing them with a local communication medium, is the defining feature of CR. But this philosophy has been hard to execute in practice because of logistical difficulties, with station staff not being able to reach out to a listenership-base spread across several hundreds of square kilometers. In today's context though, the high penetration of mobile phones has made it easier for listeners to participate in the running of radio stations, but the potential of telephony and radio integration has been exploited only minimally. In this paper, we explore the use of PhonePeti, an automated answering machine system in a community radio station based in Gurgaon, India. Answering machines are one of several ways to bring together the radio and telephony mediums. We show that this alone has the potential to considerably improve community engagement, but it also opens up many interesting issues on usability. Through quantitative and content analysis of 758 calls from 411 callers over two iterations of PhonePeti, combined with telephonic interviews of several callers, we show that significant challenges arise in being able to explain the concept of an answering machine to people who have not been exposed to a similar system in the past. We then show, through call statistics, that PhonePeti has increased community engagement by enabling more listeners to reach the station. Finally, we show that an answering machine system can be used to collect useful information from the callers.