Akkermans, Hans

Baart, André

Bon, Anna

De Boer, Victor

Tuyp, Wendelien

English

The World Wide Web is a crucial open public space for knowledge sharing, content creation and application service provisioning for billions on this planet. Although it has a global reach, still more than three billion people do not have access to the Web, the major ity of whom live in the Global South, often in rural regions, under low-resource conditions and with poor infrastructure. However the need for knowledge sharing, content creation and application service provisioning is no less on the other side of this Digital Di vide. In this paper we describe the Kasadaka platform that supports easy creation of local-content and voice-based information services targeted at currently ‘unconnected’ populations and matching the associated resource and infrastructural requirements. The Kasadaka platform and especially its Voice Service Development Kit supports the formation of an ecosystem of decentralized voice-based infor mation services that serve local populations and communities. This is, in fact, very much analogous to the services and functionalities offered by the Web, but in regions where Internet and Web are absent and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.</p

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VU Research PortalKasadaka: a Voice Service Development Platform to Bridge the Web's Digital DivideBaart, André; Bon, Anna; De Boer, Victor; Tuyp, Wendelien; Akkermans, Hanspublished inPerspectives on ICT4D2018document licenseArticle 25fa Dutch Copyright ActLink to publication in VU Research Portalcitation for published version (APA)Baart, A., Bon, A., De Boer, V., Tuyp, W., & Akkermans, H. (2018). Kasadaka: a Voice Service DevelopmentPlatform to Bridge the Web's Digital Divide. In Perspectives on ICT4D: Proceedings of the 5th InternationalSymposium "Perspectives on ICT4D" co-located with 10th ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci'18).Amsterdam, the Netherlands, May 27, 2018. (Vol. 2120). (CEUR Workshop Proceedings). CEUR WorkshopProceedings. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2120/paper1.pdfGeneral rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright ownersand it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.            • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.            • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain            • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ?Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediatelyand investigate your claim.E-mail address:vuresearchportal.ub@vu.nlDownload date: 22. May. 2021Kasadaka: A Voice Service Development Platform to Bridge theWeb’s Digital DivideAndré BaartAmsterdam Business School,Universiteit van AmsterdamAmsterdam, The Netherlandsa.h.j.baart@uva.nlAnna BonNetwork Institute, Vrije UniversiteitAmsterdamAmsterdam, The Netherlandsa.bon@vu.nlVictor de BoerComputer Science Department, VrijeUniversiteit AmsterdamAmsterdam, The Netherlandsv.de.boer@vu.nlWendelien TuypCentre for International Cooperation,Vrije Universiteit AmsterdamAmsterdam, The Netherlandsw.tuijp@vu.nlHans AkkermansNetwork Institute, Vrije UniversiteitAmsterdamAmsterdam, The Netherlandshans.akkermans@akmc.nlABSTRACTThe World Wide Web is a crucial open public space for knowledgesharing, content creation and application service provisioning forbillions on this planet. Although it has a global reach, still morethan three billion people do not have access to the Web, the major-ity of whom live in the Global South, often in rural regions, underlow-resource conditions and with poor infrastructure. However,the need for knowledge sharing, content creation and applicationservice provisioning is no less on the other side of this Digital Di-vide. In this paper we describe the Kasadaka platform that supportseasy creation of local-content and voice-based information services,targeted at currently ‘unconnected’ populations and matching theassociated resource and infrastructural requirements. The Kasadakaplatform and especially its Voice Service Development Kit supportsthe formation of an ecosystem of decentralized voice-based infor-mation services that serve local populations and communities. Thisis, in fact, very much analogous to the services and functionalitiesoffered by the Web, but in regions where Internet and Web areabsent and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.KEYWORDSdigital divide, low literacy, sub-Saharan Africa, voice-based services,low-resource hardware, services development software kit1 INTRODUCTIONThe World Wide Web is a unique public space for knowledge shar-ing, content creation and application service provisioning for bil-lions on this planet. Although it has a global reach, still more thanthree billion people do not have access to the Web: the ‘DigitalPermission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal orclassroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributedfor profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citationon the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACMmust 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 afee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org.,,© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.ACM ISBN 978-x-xxxx-xxxx-x/YY/MM. . . $15.00https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnnDivide’ [2]. The majority lives in the Global South, often in remoterural regions, under low-resource conditions and with poor or evenabsent infrastructures.However, needs for knowledge sharing, locally relevant contentand application service provisioning are certainly no less beyondthe current borders of the Web.To overcome the Digital Divide, various policies are promotedto improve global access to Internet, Web and its vast arsenal ofresources. A prominent one, for which quite large funds have beenmade available by donors such as the World Bank, is the attempt toroll out forms of “affordable internet” to currently unconnected re-gions.1 Basically, the underlying idea is a form of relatively straight-forward technology transfer from advanced countries to developingand emerging regions [1, 3, 4].Our research focuses on information exchange and knowledgesharing support for smallholder and family farmers in the AfricanSahel (including e.g. Mali, Burkina Faso, northern Ghana). In acountry such as Mali, around 80% of the population depend fortheir livelihood on work in small susbsistence agriculture in remoterural regions where there is no Internet, very limited electricity, andhigh levels of low-literacy (around 50% on average, for women evensignificantly higher). Under these conditions it is highly unlikelythat a technology transfer policy of internet roll-out to bridge theDigital Divide will come to fruition in some foreseeable future.This does not imply that nothing can be done. The contribu-tion of this paper is that one can, and that it is possible to developand deliver web-reminescent services for information and knowl-edge exchange, but not in a one-size-fits-all technology transferapproach. It requires a thorough investigation in the field of con-ditions, requirements and local specificities. This leads to insightsand technical directions that cannot be derived from advanced butfar-away technology considerations alone.2 KASADAKA TECHNICALIMPLEMENTATION AND EVALUATIONThe Kasadaka platform and especially its Voice Service Develop-ment Kit aims to facilitate the formation of an ecosystem of many1See: https://webfoundation.org/our-work/projects/alliance-for-affordable-internet/,,A. Baart et al.Figure 1: Overview of the Kasadaka system architecturedecentralized voice-based information services that serve local pop-ulations and communities. This is, in fact, very much analogous tothe services and functionalities offered by the Web, but in regionswhere Internet and Web are and will continue to be absent for theforeseeable future.The platform that we propose is called Kasadaka (talking box ina number of northern Ghanaian languages). The platform consistsof a combination of hardware and accompanying software. Thehardware forming the foundation of the KasaDaka platform is theRaspberry Pi, which is a low-resource computer based on an ARMprocessor (like found in many smartphones). The Raspberry Piruns Raspbian, a Debian based Linux distribution. To provide theRaspberry Pi with connectivity to the local mobile phone network,a USB 3G modem is used. The total costs of the hardware is aroundEUR 60. The main software component that enables the develop-ment of voice services is called the Voice Service Development Kit,or VSDK in short. The VSDK allows for the development of voiceservice (prototypes) in a web-based development environment, byusers without programming skills. The VSDK also generates theVoiceXML files that describe the interactions in a voice service. Toserve these interactions in a phone call, the Kasadaka runs a stackof (mostly open-source) applications that provide the different func-tions that are required for voice-based interactions. Asterisk, anopen-source telephony exchange application is used in conjunctionwith chan_dongle and VXI, to provide the voice-based interactionsthrough the local GSM network.The evaluation of the VSDK and the Kasadaka platform in generalwas structured in two phases: the first was an evaluation in theNetherlands with inexperienced users, that have developed voiceservices for several use cases from the west-African context. Thesecond validation was a case study in Mali with a local radio station,that developed a citizen journalism application in the local languageBambara.Both evaluations showed that the Kasadaka platform is suitablefor the development of simple voice services, by users with minimalprogramming skills. For more complex voice services, the VSDKdoes not (yet) provide sufficient functionalities out-of-the box, andneeds to be extended with data models and interactions that arespecific to the use case. Despite this limitation, the platform clearlyshows potential for the development of (financially) sustainablevoice services in the development context.3 CONCLUSIONThe wider aim of the presented Kasadaka platform and its VoiceService Development Kit is to allow the populations on the otherside of the Digital Divide to share knowledge and create content,analogous to the advantages that the Web provides. The platform islightweight and is tailored to the harsh circumstances that are foundin the Global South and takes into account the information needs ofthe local population. By enabling local voice service developmentand making custom voice services affordable for the world’s ruralpoor, Kasadaka enables the formation of a network of decentralizedvoice services. Such a network has the potential to provide thebenefits of the internet to the rural poor, reducing the gap of theDigital Divide and helping to improve the quality of life and well-being in the developing world.REFERENCES[1] 2017. Closing the Access Gap: Innovation to Accelerate Universal Internet Adoption.Technical Report. USAID.[2] Christian Fuchs and Eva Horak. 2008. Africa and the digital divide. Telematicsand Informatics 25, 2 (2008), 99–116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2006.06.004[3] The World Bank Group. 2016. Digital Dividends, World Bank Development Report.Technical Report. The World Bank, Washington, US. DOI: 10.1596/978-1-4648-0728-2.[4] Steve Schmida, James Bernard, Tess Zakaras, Caitlin Lovegrove, and Claire Swingle.2017. Connecting the Next Four Billion: Strengthening the Global Response forUniversal Internet Access. USAID, Dial, SSG Advisors.

Kasadaka: a Voice Service Development Platform to Bridge the Web's Digital Divide

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Kasadaka: a Voice Service Development Platform to Bridge the Web's Digital Divide

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