IBM Testing Voice-based Web
Published: Sep 12, 2008IBM is testing a voice-based web to make information accessible to users who may not be able to read or write, or who do not have access to the Internet.
A “Spoken Web” project, currently being piloted by IBM’s India Research Laboratory (IRL), aims to take advantage of the rapid proliferation of mobile phones in emerging countries like India. “The penetration of the PC and the Internet is not as high as that of the mobile phone, so we want to ensure that everything that is done on a web browser on a PC can be done with a mobile phone,” said Guruduth Banavar, director of IRL, in a telephone interview on Thursday.
The Spoken Web technology will enable local communities to create and disseminate locally relevant content, and interact with e-commerce sites using the spoken word over the telephone instead of the written word, Banavar said.
Using technologies such as VoiceXML (Voice eXtensible Markup Language) and HSTP (hyper speech transfer protocol), Spoken Web mirrors the World Wide Web in a telecom network where people can create and browse “VoiceSites” that have their own URLs (uniform resource locator), traverse “VoiceLinks”, and conduct business transactions, according to IBM.
The technology is about a world-wide telecom web of VoiceSites, which can be thought of as websites accessible over voice, and which are situated on a telephony network rather than the Internet, Banavar said.
Users can access the voice-based web using a toll-free number, through a variety of ways including a voice recognition system or a tone phone. VoiceSites can be also created over the phone, using a set of templates on the server side, he added.
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