Having carefully outlined the kind of posts that I planned to make over the next period of time, I will now be true to form and write about something completely different!
While out for a walk with my father, I was laughing about my rather ambitious aim of writing a blog aimed at non-English speakers without access to internet technology who may quite possibly be illiterate. We began to discuss text to voice technology and it became immediately obvious that the solution to reaching illiterates was possible and that the technology already existed.
A very quick search was enough to realise that we weren’t the first to have this idea. The OLPC (one laptop per child) already has a text to speech engine on its OS called ESpeak, my understanding is that the languages other English part of the project still needs a lot of work, but the basic functionality is already in place.
Aside from the OLCP project I found an interesting research discussion called Exploring a basic illiterate Web access system: Discussion and demonstration of technical concepts, and pointers to future research. The discussion centres on some of the difficulties that would be encountered if trying to develop actual browsers for the illiterate and suggests the different approach of using what they term as a “literacy server”. In other words a server that would act as a proxy between the user and the content they were accessing. Translating the text to the user’s language and then converting the text to speech.
So what about the hardware? I’m starting to think that mobile phones with web capabilities may be the answer here. I’m aware that mobile phone use in the third world has been spreading. Presumably we will see a similar growth in the use of smart phones and mobile internet within the next decade or so. Is anyone working on a project for distribution of second hand GPRS capable phones? I guess some more research is in order.
