Events Calendar

The Spoken Web

Speaker: Amit Nanavati, IBM Research India

Talk Title: The Spoken Web

Abstract: The Spoken Web is a system that leverages the pervasiveness of mobile phones in developing countries and allows the creation, deployment, and hosting of voice-driven applications called VoiceSites by any phone subscriber. It attempts to empower users by giving them the opportunity to become content creators and provides a mechanism for users to access information and content with affordable devices (just a regular telephone). Being a voice-driven system, it extends the access to ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) to illiterate users. Many users in the developing world are now creating and accessing information through the Spoken Web platform. The content ranges from information about people and events in a village to information about the crop prices in the market, to business information for the unorganized workforce in developing regions. This session will start with the need for such a technology, then focus on the technology platform that drives the Spoken Web and will finally end with some interesting field insights that were derived as a result of it being used by low-literate users for a period of more than three years.

Biography: Amit is a Senior Researcher and barely manages Telecom Solutions Research at IBM Research, India. He has been working on Telecom social network analysis (SNAzzy) since its inception in 2006. He is also a ”Spoken Web” evangelist – trying to promote the vision of a world-wide Spoken Web hosted in the Telecom network, which does not require an Internet connection or the ability to read and write. He is always interested in applying graph theory to various domains. He also dabbles with speech in mobile and pervasive environments. Along with Nitendra, he has been co-hosting the SiMPE workshop for the last 7 years at the ACM MobileHCI conference. Together they wrote a book on “Speech in Mobile and Pervasive Environments” published by Wiley in 2012. Much to his surprise and that of his friends, he was named a Master Inventor at IBM Research in 2011.

Host: Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 320

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mary Francis