The Lwazi community communication service: Design and piloting of a voice-based information service

Proceedings of the 20th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web, WWW 2011

Volumn , Issue , 2011, Pages 433-442

  Sharma Grover, Aditi ^a   Barnard, Etienne ^a,b  

^a CSIR MERAKA INSTITUTE   (South Africa)

^b NORTH WEST UNIVERSITY   (South Africa)

Author keywords

developing regions; literacy; mobile; rural; speech technologies; spoken dialogue systems; voice user interfaces. ictd

Indexed keywords

DEVELOPING REGIONS; LITERACY; MOBILE; RURAL; SPEECH TECHNOLOGIES; SPOKEN DIALOGUE SYSTEM; VOICE USER INTERFACES. ICTD;

DESIGN; DEVELOPING COUNTRIES; ENGINEERING EDUCATION; INFORMATION RETRIEVAL; INFORMATION SERVICES; SPEECH PROCESSING; TELEPHONE SYSTEMS; WORLD WIDE WEB;

USER INTERFACES;

EID: 79955138607     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Conference Proceeding    
DOI: 10.1145/1963192.1963357     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (19)

1. Agarwal, S., Kumar, A., Nanavati, A., and Rajput, N. 2009. Content creation and dissemination by-and-for users in rural areas. In Proc. IEEE/ACM Int. Con. On ICTD (ICTD 09). April 2009, 56-65.
2. Barnard, E.; Cloete, L.; and Patel, H. 2003. Language and technology literacy barriers to accessing government services. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. vol. 2739, 37-42.
3. DPSA, 2010. Community Development Workers. Retrieved June 2010, from http://www.dpsa.gov.za/cdw/index.asp.
4. Gapminder, 2005. Data in Gapminder World. Retrieved June 2010, from http://www.gapminder.org/data.
5. Gordon, R. G., Jr. (Ed.), 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the world, 15th ed. Dallas: SIL International. Retrieved June 2010, from http://www.ethnologue. com.
6. Heeks, R., 2009. IT and the World's 'Bottom Billion'. Communications of the ACM, vol. 52(4), 22-24.
7. Heugh, K., 2007. Language and literacy issues in South Africa. In Naz Rassool (Ed.), Global issues in language, education and development: Perspectives from postcolonial countries (190-196). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
8. Kumar, A., Rajput, N., Chakraborty, D., Agarwal, S.K., and Nanavati, A.A. 2007. WWTW: The World Wide Telecom Web. In Proc. NSDR'07: SIGCOMM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions.
9. Meraka Institute, 2009. Lwazi Project Final Report. Pretoria, CSIR. Retrieved July 2010, from http://www.meraka.org.za/lwazi.
10. Nasfors, P. 2007. Efficient voice information services for developing countries. Master's thesis, Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University.
11. Pandey, P., Sehgal, A. R., Riboud, M., Levine, D., And Goyal, M., 2007. Informing resource-poor populations and the delivery of entitled health and social services in rural India: A cluster randomized controlled trial. Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 298, 1867-1875. (Pubitemid 350005231)
12. Patel, N., Chittamuru, D., Jain, A., Dave, P., Parikh, T.P. 2010. Avaaj Otalo - A Field Study of an Interactive Voice Forum for Small Farmers in Rural Indi. In Proc. CHI 2010, 733-742.
13. Plauche, M.; Nallasamy, U.; Pal, J.; Wooters, C.; and Ramachandran, D. 2006. Speech recognition for illiterate access to information and technology. In Proc. IEEE Int Conf. of ICTD, 83-92.
14. Plauche, M.P., De Waal, A., Sharma Grover, A., Gumede, T., 2010. Morphological Analysis: A method for selecting ICT applications in South African government service delivery. Information Technologies and International Development, vol. 6(1), 1-20.
15. Sharma Grover, A., Plauche, M., Kuun, C., Barnard, E., 2009. HIV health information access using spoken dialogue systems: Touchtone vs. speech. In Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on ICTD 2009 (ICTD 09), 95-107.
16. Sherwani, J.; Ali, N.; Mirza, S.; Fatma, A.; Memon, Y.; Karim, M.; Tongia, R.; and Rosenfeld, R. 2007. Healthline: Speech-based access to health information by low literate users. In Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. of ICTD, 131-139.
17. Sherwani, J.; Palijo, S.; Mirza, S.; Ahmed, T.; Ali, N.; and Rosenfeld, R. 2009. Speech vs. touch-tone: Telephony interfaces for information access by low literate users. In Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on ICTD, 447-457.
18. Van Niekerk, D.R. and Barnard,E. Phonetic alignment for speech synthesis in under-resourced languages. In Proc. 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2009), September 2009, 880-883.
19. Web Foundation, 2011. New Project: VOICES: Voice-based Community-cEntric mobile Services for social development. Retrieved January 2011, from http://www.webfoundation.org/2011/01/new-project-voices-voice-based-community- centric-mobile-services-for-socialdevelopment/