Spread and sustainability: the geography and economics of speech-based services

Abstract

We have been developing techniques for spreading telephone-based services to low-literate people in the developing world, bypassing the need for explicit user training. We achieve this by using entertainment as a viral conduit to spread and popularize development related voice-based services. Polly, our telephone-based voice manipulation and forwarding system, has been in continuous operation in Pakistan since May 2012. In this poster, we show the geographical spread of Polly over the initial four months of its deployment. We then describe our attempts at reducing our operating costs by shifting some of them to users, and the impact this had on user behavior, demonstrated via randomized control trials and by the usage of landline vs. mobile phones.