1Entertainment has recently been shown to be a powerful motivator for mastering new technologies. We therefore set out to use viral entertainment to introduce telephone-based, speech-based services to low-literate people in developing countries. We describe Polly, a simple voice manipulation and forwarding system that went viral in Pakistan last year. Seeded once by 32 low-skilled office workers in a Pakistani university, in 3 weeks Polly amassed 2,032 users and 10,629 interactions. From analyzing the traffic and its content, it is evident that Polly has been used extensively for entertainment and social contact, but it has also been put to an unintended use as a voicemail and group messaging facility. This demonstrated the potential for speech based services, and the pent-up demand for entertainment, among our target population. Also of note, Polly's viral spread crossed gender and age boundaries and even established itself in a female population. However, it appears to have not crossed socioeconomic boundaries. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. ICTD '12, March 12 -15 2012, Atlanta, GA, USA Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1045-1/12/03 $10.00. Categories and Subject Descriptors Entertainment as Vehicle for DevelopmentMost ICTD projects focus on core development areas -such as health, agriculture, and education -and design user interfaces suitable for their target users, who are often low literate and inexperienced with technology. Recently, however, Smyth et al.[1] described the remarkable ingenuity exhibited by such users when they are motivated by the desire be to entertained, and concluded that such powerful motivation "turns UI barriers into mere speed bumps" (ibid). Inspired by this powerful demonstration, we set out to systematically develop viral entertainment as a vehicle for dissemination of development related services.Our ultimate goal is to disseminate speech-based communication services for low-literate telephone users throughout the developing world. Such services may include: buying and selling goods and services (i.e. a speech-based equivalent of Craig's List, craigslist.com); finding and communicating with others who share a common interest, and facilitating social and political activism (speech-based message boards); expressing opinions and making them broadly accessible to others (speech-based blogging and tweeting); sending and receiving group messages (speech-based mailing lists); broadcasting and receiving announcement...
We explore how telephone-based services might be mass adopted by low-literate users in the developing world. We focus on speech and push-button dialog systems requiring neither literacy nor training. Building on the success of Polly, a simple telephone-based voice manipulation and forwarding system that was first tested in 2011, we report on its first large-scale sustained deployment. In 24/7 operation in Pakistan since May 9, 2012, as of mid-September Polly has spread to 85,000 users, engaging them in 495,000 interactions, and is continuing to spread to 1,000 new people daily. It has also attracted 27,000 people to a job search service, who in turn listened 279,000 times to job ads and forwarded them 22,000 times to their friends. We report users' activity over time and across demographics, analyze user behavior within several randomized controlled trials, and describe lessons learned regarding spread, scalability and sustainability of telephone-based speechbased services.
We present a case study of
Individuals with neuromotor speech disorders due to con ditions such as Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson Disease and Cerebral Palsy have soft and slurred speech. These individ uals receive speech training to increase vocal loudness and to speak slowly and clearly. Although successful in clinical settings, generalizability of these techniques to daily con versation requires technological innovation. To address this issue we designed SpeechOmeter, a Google Glass applica tion that provides unobtrusive real-time visual feedback on vocal loudness relative to the ambient noise level. The sys tem also provides clinicians with treatment adherence and performance statistics in order to further personalize speech training regimes. In a longitudinal usability study 12 in dividuals with MS increased vocal loudness when provided with feedback. A live demonstration of SpeechOmeter will enable attendees to experience the system.
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