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The World Wide Telecom Web browser

Published: 17 December 2010 Publication History

Abstract

In developing regions, literacy levels and Internet penetration is considerably low, but phone penetration is high and is growing rapidly. In such a setting, the World Wide Telecom Web (WWTW), commonly known as the Spoken Web, provides a compelling alternative to the World Wide Web, since it relies on audio interaction over the phone. WWTW consists of interconnected voice applications (called Voice-Sites) that can be accessed from any phone by making a simple phone call.
In this paper, we present a browser for this WWTW, that enables these users to browse VoiceSites in a seamless fashion using spoken commands such as back, forward, new, history and bookmarks. The browser can be accessed by making a phone call to a specific number. To support access from any dumb phone instrument, it does not execute on the phone but on the server side. We discuss the scalability of this design and overcome the limitations of sequential speech interaction by disambiguating the browser commands with the VoiceSite's local commands. Simplicity of the user interface is vital for the usefulness of the browser for the low-literate population. This paper presents the concept, design, and usability of the Telecom Web browser.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ACM DEV '10: Proceedings of the First ACM Symposium on Computing for Development
December 2010
228 pages
ISBN:9781450304733
DOI:10.1145/1926180
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 17 December 2010

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Author Tags

  1. CCXML
  2. VXML
  3. VoiceSites
  4. World Wide Telecom Web
  5. browsers
  6. developing regions
  7. mobile phones
  8. spoken web

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ACM DEV '10

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Overall Acceptance Rate 52 of 164 submissions, 32%

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  • (2019)Improving User Experience of Eye Tracking-Based InteractionACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/333884426:6(1-46)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2019
  • (2017)Better togetherProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services10.1145/3098279.3098534(1-13)Online publication date: 4-Sep-2017
  • (2017)Low-Cost Mobile Learning Solutions for Community Health WorkersProceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion10.1145/3041021.3053377(729-734)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2017
  • (2017)Beyond "yesterday's tomorrow"Personal and Ubiquitous Computing10.1007/s00779-016-0982-021:1(157-171)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2017
  • (2015)Building citizen engagement into the implementation of welfare schemes in rural IndiaProceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development10.1145/2737856.2738027(1-10)Online publication date: 15-May-2015
  • (2015)The Web of Radios - Introducing African Community Radio as an Interface to the Web of DataThe Semantic Web: ESWC 2012 Satellite Events10.1007/978-3-662-46641-4_16(219-232)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2015
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  • (2013)ACQRProceedings of the 15th international conference on Human-computer interaction with mobile devices and services10.1145/2493190.2493195(308-317)Online publication date: 27-Aug-2013
  • (2013)Exploring playback and recording of web-based audio media on low-end feature phonesProceedings of the 3rd ACM Symposium on Computing for Development10.1145/2442882.2442899(1-9)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2013
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