'You will talk to the Web, and the Web will talk back,' predicts International Business Machine (IBM), however IBM now wants this web to work on cellphones rather than on personal computers (PCs) alone.
This concept named 'Spoken Web' and led by IBM's India Research Laboratory (IRL) team is already being incubated in IBM's eight global labs in six countries. In fact, the corporation recently completed a pilot in Andhra Pradesh to implement the concept which was very quite successful. It started out with around 100 villagers but many hundreds joined later after seeing the response.
The spoken web works like the world wide web. Just as the web is a collection of websites, the spoken web is a network of voicesites or interconnected voice applications. These voicesites are accessed through a telephone over an audio channel. The possibilities of these services are endless, for instance using this facility a fishermen can get weather information before heading out to sea; farmers can look up the commodity prices; plumbers can schedule appointment and grocery shops can display catalogues.
