A World Wide Web That Talks From: Technology Review - 02/16/2011 By: Tom Simonite IBM researchers have enhanced the Spoken Web, which is operated by voice over the telephone and attempts to recreate the text-based Internet for people in developing countries with low literacy levels and minimal technical skills, by adding a search feature to help users find information. "As the number of voice sites grows, and they get more content, people need a way to find what they want quickly," says IBM Research India's Nitendra Rajput. Although voice-recognition technology can take a user's search term and compare it to a database of voice sites, presenting the search results back to the user is more difficult. Instead of the system reading out every search result to the user, the researchers designed a system that tells the user how many search results there are and then asks how to narrow down the search further. When the number of sites is narrowed down to five or fewer, then all are read to the user, who must choose which one to select. The researchers tested the new system on 40 farmers in the Indian state of Gujarat, and had promising results, encouraging IBM to roll out it across the entire Spoken Web. "If there is relevant information on the real Web, we can pull it in to the spoken Web using API calls and text-to-speech technology," Rajput says. Read the entire article at: http://www.technologyreview.com/web/32342/?p1=A3&a=f Links: Spoken Web http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/arun_kumar.wwtw.html Nitendra Rajput http://www.research.ibm.com/people/r/rajput/