Spoken web

Abstract

The traditional notion of accessibility is primarily focused on people with different kinds of physical or mental disabilities. Most efforts are spent in developing technologies to help overcome these disabilities. However, in recent times, new kinds of disabilities, namely illiteracy and un-affordability have gained lot of attention in the context of building technologies and solutions for developing regions. Close to 80% of world's population does not have access to Internet whereas mobile phones have rapidly achieved high penetration even in various remote areas. Spoken Web has emerged as an alternate web for the underprivileged by breaking the barriers of illiteracy, affordability and local languages. It enables ordinary telephone subscribers to create, deploy and offer customized voice-driven applications through a simple voice-based interface accessible from affordable, commercial telephony devices. In this paper, we present an overview of the Spoken Web technology, its capabilities and various kinds of applications it enables. We further briefly present a few case studies and give a view of research efforts spurned by this technology.