The benefits of augmenting telephone voice menu navigation with visual browsing and search
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
TinyPC: enabling low-cost internet access in developing regions
Proceedings of the 2007 workshop on Networked systems for developing regions
Designing digital games for rural children: a study of traditional village games in India
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
RuralCafe: web search in the rural developing world
Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web
mango: low-cost, scalable delivery of rich content on mobiles
Proceedings of the 1st ACM workshop on Networking, systems, and applications for mobile handhelds
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
After access: challenges facing mobile-only internet users in the developing world
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Mobile solutions for front-line health workers in developing countries
Healthcom'09 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on e-Health networking, applications and services
Featherweight multimedia for information dissemination
ICTD'09 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Information and communication technologies and development
Speech vs. touch-tone: telephony interfaces for information access by low literate users
ICTD'09 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Information and communication technologies and development
Analyzing and accelerating web access in a school in peri-urban India
Proceedings of the 20th international conference companion on World wide web
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
Paying in kind for crowdsourced work in developing regions
Pervasive'12 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Pervasive Computing
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Web-based audio information systems have the potential to bring the full promise of the Internet to the developing world. However, these systems run into a practical difficulty - insufficient support for playback and recording of web-based multimedia from feature phones. At the moment, feature phones constitute more than 90% of all phone shipments in emerging markets like India, and will continue to form a significant fraction (50%) several years from now. In this paper we explore the practical challenges associated with audio playback and audio recording on feature phones. We present a systematic evaluation of the options to play and record audio media in a range of feature phones, and highlight problems stemming from a lack of memory, slow processor speeds and no support for progressive streaming downloads. In summary, the players in these phones are usually designed to handle audio files of short durations (a few minutes). Anything longer results in frequent breaks in playback (of up to 300msecs), and a very poor experience for the end-users. We investigate various solution approaches that may overcome these issues, and present an implementation and evaluation that achieves a seamless user experience on any audio stream.