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IVR Junction: The Technology that Builds Voice Forums in the Developing World
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IVR Junction: The Technology that Builds Voice Forums in the Developing World

 
August 13, 2013

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  By Daniel Brecht, Contributing Writer
 


One of main factors that currently separate countries with more advanced economies from less-developed ones is access to computer devices and the Internet. In fact, the 5.9 billion mobile subscribers who live in the developing world mainly use their devices for voice services rather than access the multitude of information and social platforms that are currently available through the Web. 


In addition to the lack of reliable connections and available services, natives of less developed countries (LDC) often do not have sufficient wages to afford efficient device communication technologies or are affected by limited literacy of basic computing skills, if not lack the knowledge in how to operate mobile phones.

An attempt to change this situation has been made in rural India, Somaliland and Mali where researchers from the Technologies for Emerging Markets Group at Microsoft (News - Alert) Research India, a computing research laboratory engaged in scientific studies in computing, information technology and related areas, have launched the IVR Junction. This is a free and open-source tool—a project sponsored by Microsoft Research Connections—that works by connecting an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to cloud services: The scope is to provide free online content and audio recordings to a global audience where there is normally no access to computing and information resources.

Using IVR Junction, people in developing countries with poor computer literacy and income can establish scalable voice forums and connect to other users by simply using a SIP mobile phone. Thanks to the IVR solution, they have now the opportunity to have an inexpensive phone broadcasting system to not only make or receive phone calls (at local call rates) but are also able to record a message and listen to posts via their handset. Meanwhile, the global community is able to access and contribute recordings as well via the Internet.

IVR Junction is an easy-to-use application that can be used by organizations (even small non-profit ones without technical skills) that can run it with a basic computer and modem. It is able to run also where Internet connections are not stable or are prone to outages.

The Junction tool works in conjunction with the company’s “Prophecy” IVR platform: Voxeo Prophecy 11 is a telephony software platform for wideband audio and is used to deploy any IVR or VoIP application. VoiceXML (News - Alert) can be used to create the audio dialogs in the voice forum. Collectively, they provide users voice-based communication and gives them the ability to record and listen to posts via their handsets.

Furthermore, the IVR Junction platform makes it also possible to exploit other multimedia technologies such as video. It’s even possible for the user to obtain data through their telephone keypad or by speech commands. What’s more, it can enable users to interact with popular Internet websites, such as YouTube (that offers free Web hosting of audio recordings), Facebook (that offers a free account to have dissemination of voice content) and Twitter (News - Alert) (that has a voice-tweet program).

Those interested in knowing more about IVR junction can visit its official website. One can also find out details about this open-source system by researching information on the winning entry to the Tech Challenge for Atrocity Prevention, hosted by Humanity United and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).




Edited by Rich Steeves
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