Academic research, articles, or white papers on mobiles in social development
Avaaj Otalo - A Voice-Based Community Forum
Posted by PrabhasPokharel on Aug 17, 2009
In places such as rural India, small-scale farmers struggle to meet the challenges of fierce global competition, increasing costs of farm inputs, water shortages, and new diseases and pests brought on by a changing climate. To deal with these challenges, information has become a critical input to farming operations: faced with rapidly changing conditions, farmers need market information, timely technical advice, and alerts on new and improved techniques. There are currently few sources for reliable, timely knowledge. Television and radio have achieved remarkable penetration in rural areas and stand as an effective means of information dissemination. However, without a platform to discuss, debate, and relate personal experience, information is not actionable.
Social software - email, blogs, wikis, forums, and social networks - has revolutionized how people learn and share expertise on the web, but the Internet and its associated access technologies (broadband connectivity, PCs) are out of reach for much of rural India. Even if Internet-connected PCs were available, widespread usage is constrained by language and literacy barriers. But while computers are unaffordable or unfamiliar to rural communities, mobile phones are not.
Avaaj Otalo provides three modes of functionality. When farmers call in, they can either listen to archives of DSC's weekly radio boradcast, listen to announcements from DSC staff put up specifically for Avaaj Otalo, or participate in the question-answer forum. The archive and announcements are offered for browsing. If farmers choose to go to the forum, they can either record their own question or listen to recently posted questions and answers. The questions play chronologically (most recent question first), and if questions have answers, those answers are played right after the question.
The system itself is a Voice-XML based Interactive Voice Response system. When a farmer calls in, he/she hears audio prompts and is asked to enter a number from the keypad or say a word in order to navigate. Currently, the infrastructure is hosted by IBM India Research labs, and uses software from Genesys (owned by IBM) and Apache Tomcat to manage the VXML based system. For reference, it should be noted that free and open source solutions to manage Interactive Voice Response Systems based on VXML are also available (VoiceGlue with Asterisk, for example).
Avaaj Otalo - A Voice-Based Community Forum Locations
Avaaj Otalo - A Voice-Based Community Forum data sheet 21120 Views
In places such as rural India, small-scale farmers struggle to meet the challenges of fierce global competition, increasing costs of farm inputs, water shortages, and new diseases and pests brought on by a changing climate. To deal with these challenges, information has become a critical input to farming operations: faced with rapidly changing conditions, farmers need market information, timely technical advice, and alerts on new and improved techniques. There are currently few sources for reliable, timely knowledge. Television and radio have achieved remarkable penetration in rural areas and stand as an effective means of information dissemination. However, without a platform to discuss, debate, and relate personal experience, information is not actionable.
Social software - email, blogs, wikis, forums, and social networks - has revolutionized how people learn and share expertise on the web, but the Internet and its associated access technologies (broadband connectivity, PCs) are out of reach for much of rural India. Even if Internet-connected PCs were available, widespread usage is constrained by language and literacy barriers. But while computers are unaffordable or unfamiliar to rural communities, mobile phones are not.
Avaaj Otalo provides three modes of functionality. When farmers call in, they can either listen to archives of DSC's weekly radio boradcast, listen to announcements from DSC staff put up specifically for Avaaj Otalo, or participate in the question-answer forum. The archive and announcements are offered for browsing. If farmers choose to go to the forum, they can either record their own question or listen to recently posted questions and answers. The questions play chronologically (most recent question first), and if questions have answers, those answers are played right after the question.
The system itself is a Voice-XML based Interactive Voice Response system. When a farmer calls in, he/she hears audio prompts and is asked to enter a number from the keypad or say a word in order to navigate. Currently, the infrastructure is hosted by IBM India Research labs, and uses software from Genesys (owned by IBM) and Apache Tomcat to manage the VXML based system. For reference, it should be noted that free and open source solutions to manage Interactive Voice Response Systems based on VXML are also available (VoiceGlue with Asterisk, for example).
Avaaj Otalo - A Voice-Based Community Forum Locations
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