World Wide Telecom Web

World Wide Telecom Web (also called as Spoken Web or Telecom Web) is an initiative to create an alternate web for the under-privileged. It could help bridge the digital divide by bringing the benefits of the information revolution to the billions of underserved people by providing information and services through a voice driven channel over an ordinary phone call. Information on this web could be community created as well as leveraged from World Wide Web. It is essentially a voice driven eco-system parallel and complimentary to that of the existing Web.WWTW: The World Wide Telecom Web, In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions (NSDR), August 2007, Kyoto, Japan.] Though primarily meant for the under-served in population in emerging economies, it has several applications for the developed world as well. [The World Wide Telecom Web - [http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/arun_kumar.WWTW.html] ]

WWTW can be accessible to more number of people in the world as it enables an ordinary phone subscriber to join the digital information revolution. This enables a significatly larger fraction of the human population to benefit from existing and envisioned services than what was made possible by WWW. Specifically, it removes accessibility barriers that manifest themselves in terms of illiteracy, unaffordability and lack of relevant information. Further, it provides the means to create and sustain an ecosystem of local (and global) services, information and communities relevant to these underprivileged users.

How it works

WWTW is a network of interconnected VoiceSites (analogous to web sites) that are voice driven applications "created by" users themselves and "hosted" in the telecom network. VoiceSites can be interconnected using 'VoiLinks' (analogous to hyperlinks) which are links between two voice applications within the web. VoiLinks can span across different enterprises enabling cross-organizational workflows driven by a voice interface over an ordinary phone.

Key enabler technologies include:

1. VoiGen - VoiceSite Creator

2. VoiHost - VoiceSite Hosting Engine

3. HSTP - Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol

4. WWTW Browser

Brief History

World Wide Telecom Web was invented by Arun Kumar [http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/arun_kumar.index.html] at IBM India Research Lab [http://www.research.ibm.com/irl/] during late 2004 who was later joined by fellow researcher Nitendra Rajput [http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/rajput.index.html] in mid-2005. Originally, WWTW was primarily viewed as a novel application of speech technology and VoiceXML standard even though use of VoiceSites for under-privileged was one of the listed benefits. During the course of a year, in their extra time, they refined the vision and built a couple of primitive prototypes of VoiceSite generator application (later named VoiGen by Arun) with the help of fellow researcher Dipanjan Chakraborty [http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/chakraborty.index.html] and a software engineer colleague at IBM named Sandeep Jindal. In late 2006, inspired by Prof. C.K._Prahalad and led by Ponani Gopalakrishnan (then the director of IBM India Research Lab), Arun and Nitendra along with Dipanjan and Amit Anil Nanavati [http://portal.acm.org/author_page.cfm?id=81100314292] got funded for an Exploratory Research project to develop technologies for people towards the Base of the Pyramid. Here, WWTW shot into prominence and got recognized as the most compelling ecosystem for illiterate, low earning population of developing countries such as India. The team reported the work done so far in a Research Report [http://domino.research.ibm.com/library/cyberdig.nsf/1e4115aea78b6e7c85256b360066f0d4/9fb1978638a52de5852572890036ddc2?OpenDocument] . Soon after Sheetal K. Agarwal [http://www.research.ibm.com/irl/] joined the team. Together this team designed and built the initial technological building blocks of Telecom Web details of which can be found in publications available at [http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/arun_kumar.wwtwpubs.html] .Arun proposed the use of out-of-band-signaling mechanism, followed in telecom networks, to create an HTTP equivalent protocol for enabling voice hyperlinks and coined it as Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP). The team designed and built the first prototype of this protocol in mid-2007 and reported it in Hypertext Conference in September 2007.

Notes

References

*WWTW: The World Wide Telecom Web, In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions (NSDR), August 2007, Kyoto, Japan.
*The World Wide Telecom Web - [http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/arun_kumar.WWTW.html]

External Links

*Spoken Web: a voice-based vision of the Internet - [http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20080721/market08.shtml]
*Roundup: EBay looks shaky, NPR’s API, the Spoken Web, and more - [http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/07/17/roundup-ebay-looks-shaky-npr-s-api-spoken-web-and-more]
*'Spoken Web' can bridge India's digital divide - [http://www.zdnetasia.com/insight/business/0,39051970,62043775,00.htm]

Further Reading

* Raising a Billion Voices - [http://interactions.acm.org/content/?p=1094] , In ACM Interactions, March-April 2008.
* HSTP: Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol, In Proceedings of the Eighteenth International ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Hypertext 2007), Sept. 10-12th, 2007, Manchester, UK.
* The World Wide Telecom Web Browser - [http://www2008.org/papers/pp147.html] , In 2008 International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), Beijing, China, 21-25 April 2008.