ON A cold winter's day in December 2006, Guruduth Banavar's team gathered up some workers at a bustling marketplace in New Delhi, India, and cajoled them, each in turn, into a car.
The team was from the IBM India Research Laboratory (IRL) in New Dehli. They had come to the market to test an alternative to the internet for India's rural population. The system is based on the cellphone, though, and so the din of hawkers selling vegetables, and shoppers looking for everything from jewellery to electronics, made conversation impossible.
Once inside the car, however, 10 of the 12 volunteers - who had never before interacted with a speaking computer - were able to create their own voice-based website, or VoiceSite, in just under 4 minutes apiece. The first trial of the "spoken web" was a success.
The spoken web is an attempt to bring the power of the internet ...
