Spoken web: Creation, navigation and searching of voiceSites

Abstract

The Spoken Web is a voice-based equivalent of the World Wide Web (WWW), developed by IBM Research Laboratory, India, primarily designed for rural and semi-urban people to provide information of value to them through their mobile or landline phones. This demonstration aims to present the use of VoiceSites for information creation and access for the rural population. VoiceSites can be accessed by calling a phone number and end-users can listen to the content over phone and navigate through voice or the phone keypad. While one demonstration is of creating a VoiceSite, the other is for browsing a multitude of VoiceSites that would also demonstrate conducting transactions across VoiceSites. We will also present the mechanism to search for content on VoiceSites. These demonstrations will help in presenting the concept of the Spoken Web, which we foresee, can have the same effect in the developing regions community which the WWW has done to the developed world over the last decade.