Text-free user interfaces for illiterate and semiliterate users
Information Technologies and International Development
Speech interfaces for equitable access to information technology
Information Technologies and International Development
A comparative study of speech and dialed input voice interfaces in rural India
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Speech interfaces for information access by low literate users
Speech interfaces for information access by low literate users
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
Where there's a will there's a way: mobile media sharing in urban india
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Small-vocabulary speech recognition for resource-scarce languages
Proceedings of the First ACM Symposium on Computing for Development
Experiences of deploying and commercializing a community radio automation system in India
Proceedings of the 2nd 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
Viral entertainment as a vehicle for disseminating speech-based services to low-literate users
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development
Spread and sustainability: the geography and economics of speech-based services
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Symposium on Computing for Development
Behavior analysis of low-literate users of a viral speech-based telephone service
Proceedings of the 4th Annual Symposium on Computing for Development
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We explore how telephone-based services might be mass adopted by low-literate users in the developing world. We focus on speech and push-button dialog systems requiring neither literacy nor training. Building on the success of Polly, a simple telephone-based voice manipulation and forwarding system that was first tested in 2011, we report on its first large-scale sustained deployment. In 24/7 operation in Pakistan since May 9, 2012, as of mid-September Polly has spread to 85,000 users, engaging them in 495,000 interactions, and is continuing to spread to 1,000 new people daily. It has also attracted 27,000 people to a job search service, who in turn listened 279,000 times to job ads and forwarded them 22,000 times to their friends. We report users' activity over time and across demographics, analyze user behavior within several randomized controlled trials, and describe lessons learned regarding spread, scalability and sustainability of telephone-based speech-based services.