Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platforms have been widely deployed in resource-limited settings. These systems tend to afford asynchronous push interactions, and within the context of health, provide medication reminders, descriptions of symptoms and tips on self-management. Here, we present the development of an IVR system for resource-limited settings that enables real-time, synchronous interaction. Inspired by community radio, and calls for health systems that are truly local, we developed 'Sehat ki Vaani'. Sehat ki Vaani is a real-time IVR platform that enables hosting and participation in radio chat shows on community-led topics. We deployed Sehat ki Vaani with two communities in North India on topics related to the management of Type 2 diabetes and maternal health. Our deployments highlight the potential for synchronous IVR systems to offer community connection and localised sharing of experience, while also highlighting the complexity of producing, hosting and participating in radio shows in real time through IVR. We discuss the relative strengths and weaknesses of synchronous IVR systems, and highlight lessons learnt for interaction design in this area.
Menus are one of the effective user interfaces which is used for navigation in many systems like desktop applications, voice system, etc. Placement of each menu item in the menu tree is known as menu configuration. Deciding optimal configuration in a menu based system is a challenging task. This task to decide the optimal configuration dynamically can be done through adaptive interfaces. Adaptive interfaces play significant role when optimality varies with time. However, the negative impacts of adaptive interfaces on the users familiar with the system discourage its use. There is a need to have separate design for handling users familiar and unfamiliar with the system. In this work, we study the adverse effect of adaptive voice menu on the experienced users. We also propose strategies to reduce the adverse effect of adaptivity. We design and deploy a menu based voice system to conduct a control experiment to evaluate proposed strategies. The proposed strategies try to differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar users and takes remedial steps to suppress the adverse effect of adaptive interfaces for familiar users.
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