Mobile Phones and Voice-Based Educational Services in Rural India: Project RuralVoice

Abstract

Voice-based services offer major business opportunities in developing areas such as India and Africa. In these areas mobile phones have become very popular, and their usage is increasing all the time. In this project, we study the deployment of voice-based mobile educational services for developing countries. Our study is based on a Spoken Web technology developed by IBM Research Labs, and our focus is on India’s Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP). It is being built as a service that runs on the telecom infrastructure similar to World Wide Web that runs as a service on the Internet infrastructure. Spoken Web proposes to build an alternate web for the underprivileged population that is yet untouched by the enormous benefits of Internet and World Wide Web. In this research project RuralVoice we also investigate how Finnish service and technology companies can co-create novel services for this challenging target population in three educational areas i.e. agriculture, healthcare and entrepreneurship education.