Word clouds are extensively used to present a summary of the prominent words in a document on the World Wide Web. Such clouds give the user an idea about the content of the document. In this paper we present a mechanism to create and render an audio cloud for audio content. Such audio clouds are expected to provide a similar summary of the audio documents. They have wide applicability in various domains, especially for low-literate users who currently do not use the Internet but interact with audio-based systems.

Much of the mobile work by HCI researchers explores a future world populated by high-end devices and relatively affluent users. This paper turns to consider the hundreds of millions of people for whom such sophistication will not be realised for many years to come. In developing world contexts, people will continue to rely on voice-primary interactions due to both literacy and economic reasons. Here, we motivate research into how to accommodate advanced mobile interface techniques while overcoming the handset, data-connection and user limitations. As a first step we introduce TapBack: back-of-device taps to control a dialled-up, telephone-network-based voice service. We show how these audio gestures might be recognised over a standard telephone connection, via users' existing low-end devices. Further, in a longitudinal deployment, the techniques were made available on a live voice service used by rural Indian farmers. Data from the study illustrates the desire by users to adopt the approach and its potential extensions.

The Spoken Web is a voice-based equivalent of the World Wide Web (WWW), developed by IBM Research Laboratory, India, primarily designed for rural and semi-urban people to provide information of value to them through their mobile or landline phones. This demonstration aims to present the use of VoiceSites for information creation and access for the rural population. VoiceSites can be accessed by calling a phone number and end-users can listen to the content over phone and navigate through voice or the phone keypad. While one demonstration is of creating a VoiceSite, the other is for browsing a multitude of VoiceSites that would also demonstrate conducting transactions across VoiceSites. We will also present the mechanism to search for content on VoiceSites. These demonstrations will help in presenting the concept of the Spoken Web, which we foresee, can have the same effect in the developing regions community which the WWW has done to the developed world over the last decade.

In this paper we present the results of a field study of Avaaj Otalo (literally, "voice stoop"), an interactive voice application for small-scale farmers in Gujarat, India. Through usage data and interviews, we describe how 51 farmers used the system over a seven month pilot deployment. The most popular feature of Avaaj Otalo was a forum for asking questions and browsing others' questions and responses on a range of agricultural topics. The forum developed into a lively social space with the emergence of norms, persistent moderation, and a desire for both structured interaction with institutionally sanctioned authorities and open discussion with peers. For all 51 users this was the first experience participating in an online community of any sort. In terms of usability, simple menu-based navigation was readily learned, with users preferring numeric input over speech. We conclude by discussing implications of our findings for designing voice-based social media serving rural communities in India and elsewhere.

Delivering new technology solutions in a well established IT-educated consumer market largely depends on the usefulness and usability of the solution. However, this is very different from delivering ICT solutions in developing regions where there are multiple factors that affect technology adoption, which seem to be at least as important as the technology itself. This paper revolves around a case study of World Wide Telecom Web (WWTW), commonly known as Spoken Web, a voice based content-creation and dissemination platform. The study reflects different challenges in adoption and different ways of evolution of WWTW in the varied organizational, social and operational settings in rural India. The case study uses pilot deployments in four regions in India, each involving at least 500 users. All the four deployments had a different organizational, social and operational model. This paper presents the implications of these differences on the WWTW technology adoption. The study shows that organizations have a strong influence in the adoption, social settings play a major role in the evolution of the solution and operational model influences the quality of the solution.