Farmers’ voices on the spoken web

An article in Zunia shows that a network of voice recordings, accessible from any telephone, provides information to farmers in India. Villagers can add their own VoiceSites to promote their business.

In almost all developing countries, internet penetration is much lower than that of the mobile phone. At the same time, the rate of increase of mobile phone penetration far exceeds that of the internet. In many cases, the lack of literacy is a further impediment to the proliferation of the internet.

The IBM India Research Laboratory is now trying to make use of the growth of mobile telephony to overcome the problems of literacy and internet connectivity. We are working to create a world wide network of VoiceSites linked together to make the Spoken Web.

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