Conspeakous VoiGen:Creating Context-Aware Voicesites

Information technology undoubtedly plays an important role in the socio-economic development of a country. Rapidly evolving ways to access information spread over the Web has benefited people in all aspects of life. However, there still exists vast untapped population at the bottom of pyramid which is aloof from these benefits. Reasons include lack of capital, infrastructure, awareness and illiteracy. Of late, we are seeing researchers going to the field to make information technology (IT) available to this class of people through simple interaction devices such as phone and interaction medium as speech. The idea of using the existing telecom network as a medium to reach information sources led to evolution of World Wide Telecom Web (WWTW). The WWTW enables access to IT services through voice interaction over phone. However due to the limitation of the sequential nature of Voicesite interactions, the cognitive load on the user can be significantly high for complex VoiceSite structures. In this paper, we present a novel system, Conspeakuous VoiGen – an architecture for creating context aware VoiceSites. Conspeakous VoiceSites use contexts --- informative variables such as time, callerID, caller location, various caller preferences --- from the system’s environment to gather useful information and present it in a flow that is more friendly and apt for the caller. The architecture has been implemented using two approaches: one that models the context as a finite state machine; and another that uses the Model-View-Controller approach to enable flexibility of managing the different contextual VoiceSites. The paper evaluates the benefits of the two approaches and presents the usability of the Conspeakuous VoiGen.