IBM yaks on about speech-based Web

IBM IS ALL TALK. At least, the Big Blue’s new idea for a voice-based, computer-less web for users who might have trouble reading, writing or affording a PC is.

IBM's India Research Laboratory (IRL) is apparently slaving away at a project dubbed "Spoken Web", aimed especially at emerging countries where mobile phones are seeing much quicker proliferation than computers or the Internet.

The project would help small local communities with limited resources to use various technologies like VoiceXML and HSTP (hyper speech transfer protocol) to produce and access content relevant to them, by speaking on the phone.

Guruduth Banavar, director of IRL told PCWorld in a recent interview "The penetration of the PC and the Internet is not as high as that of the mobile phone, so we want to ensure that everything that is done on a web browser on a PC can be done with a mobile phone".

By mimicking the Interwibble over a telecom network, users would be able to carry out various tasks including e-shopping, accessing information like the weather or exchange rates and even procuring grocery stock lists contacting plumbers and electricians, all using speech. Sort of like calling them on a normal phone then.

But IBM is speaking more in terms of "Voice Sites", which it claims will have their own URLs and which can be browsed much in the same way as Internet websites can, but verbally, and using a mobile. It will also, apparently, be possible to set up these Voice Sites over the phone, using a set of templates on the server side.

IBM claims it has already started piloting its Spoken Web with several un-named mobile service providers in India, but Banavar is also quick to point out that getting the project launched would require the help of many different firms.

The Big Blue also reckons its giant web of Voice Sites could even one day link up to the World Wide Web, but only if the Interwibble was able to convert content into a spoken interface.

Doesn’t sound to us as if this type of talk is going to work out cheap. µ

L’Inq
PC World