Viral entertainment as a vehicle for disseminating speech-based services to low-literate users

Abstract

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...

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“…al. [66]. It has had measurable impact during its large scale and long-term deployment with nearly half a million interactions and 85.000 registered users at the time, and showing considerable tendency in growth.…”

Influence Propagation: Patterns, Model and a Case Study

“…The dataset comes from Polly [34,33,32], a simple, telephone-based, voice message manipulation and forwarding system that allows a user to make a short recording of his voice, optionally modify it using a choice of funny sound effects, and have the modified recording delivered to one or more friends by their phone numbers. Each friend in turn can choose to re-forward the same message to others, and/or to create a new recording of his own.…”

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