The pre-cursors to mobile phones were walkie-talkies, and the first generation of mobile phone networks only supported voice communications. With second generation networks and a happy accident came SMS, and only with the third generation networks came mobile data services in the form of GPRS.
Most applications using mobile phones these days tend to use these newer channels of communication—SMS and data. But even though we sometimes forget, voice is still a part of mobile phone communications. This article profiles interesting ways in which voice technology is being used for social work all around the world.
Asterisk is a powerful PBX system, but requires a lot of effort to just install. There was a need for something that was easier to install and administer, thus the creation of TrixBox.
TrixBox offers two options, TrixBox CE and TrixBox Pro. TrixBox CE is an open telephony platform that combines the best of the open source telephony tools into one easy-to-install package. Based on an enhanced LAAMP (an open source bundle of Linux®, Apache™, Asterisk®, mySQL®, and PHP), the TrixBox dashboard provides easy to use, Web-based interfaces to setup, manage, maintain, and support a complete IP-PBX system. TrixBox Pro is an enhanced version that comes with more support than TrixBox CE.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a server
Key Features :
Unlimited Extensions, Voicemail and fax Support, VoiceMail to email and web, IVR Menu System, Ring Groups, Call Queues, Conferencing, Time-Based Routing, Music On Hold, Paging and Intercom, Admin Status Screen, Package Manager for easy updates, Network Settings and Phone Provisioning Tool, Opern Source Echo Cancellation.
VoiceGlue is a GPL tool that allows the integration of Asterisk with OpenVXI, and thus create a VoiceXML interpreter based on an Asterisk base. Because of the flexibility of Asterisk, VoiceGlue allows VoiceXML to be run on more than just SIP systems.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a server
Key Features :
Interaction with Asterisk; VXML 2.0 interpreter with some VXML 2.1 features; Pre-recorded audio playback in Asterisk audio formats; Asterisk DTMF detection; High-performance, high-scalability architecture.
Nuance Cafe, or Bevocal Cafe, is a free, Web-based development environment for developing VoiceXML-based applications. You program VoiceXML applications, and Nuance Cafe will interpret these for you. A generic number is provided that users can call (with a PIN), and corporate support is available to build larger and more dedicated systems.
Tool Category:
Is a web-based application/web service
Key Features :
Web-development environment for VoiceXML applications. Availability of a carrier-grade back-end VoiceXML hosting platform.
Open Source VoiceXML Interpreter that is platform-independent. (VoiceXML is designed for creating audio dialogs that feature synthesized speech, digitized audio, recognition of spoken and DTMF key input, recording of spoken input, telephony, and mixed initiative conversations.)
A free VoiceXML interpreter for JAVA with an open architecture for custom extensions. Demo implementation platforms are supporting JAVA APIs such as JSAPI and JTAPI. It implements VoiceXML 2.1. The platform independent implementation can be used for free.
FreeSWITCH is an open source telephony platform designed to facilitate the creation of voice and chat driven products. It can be used as a simple switching engine, a PBX, a media gateway or a media server to host IVR applications using simple scripts or XML to control the callflow.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a server
Key Features :
FreeSWITCH includes many modules which provide applications by default including conferencing, XML-RPC control of live calls, Interactive voice response (IVR), TTS/ASR (text to speech/automatic speech recognition), Public switched telephone network (PSTN) interconnection ability supporting both analogue and digital circuits, Voice over IP protocols including SIP, Inter-Asterisk eXchange, H.323, Jabber, GoogleTalk and others. Applications using the FreeSWITCH library can be written in C/C++, Python, Perl, Lua, JavaScript using Mozilla's SpiderMonkey engine, Java and Microsoft .NET via Microsoft's CLR or via Mono. FreeSWITCH is designed to be modular, easy to use with scripting done entirely in XML, and more stable than Asterisk.
Asterisk is a software implementation of a telephone private branch exchange (PBX). Like any PBX, it allows attached telephones to make calls to one another, and to connect to other telephone services including the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services. See the wikipedia article for more.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a server
Key Features :
Voice mail, conference calling, interactive voice response (phone menus), and automatic call distribution. With hardware, can attach traditional analogue telephones to an Asterisk installation. Direct support of VoIP protocols, including SIP, MGCP and H.323. Large Userbase, and a large collection of proprietary and free add-ons and features.
We are excited to attend Highway Africa 2009 and the Digital Citizen Indaba 4.0. The theme is "Reporting Africa - 2010; Developement and Democracy," and the lineup of workshops and debates includes topics such as Freedom of Expression in Cyberspace: Secure Communications, Using Twitter as a Source for Journalists, and Mobile Technology as Source of Revenue for Media Business. (Full program here) DCI, which will be held right before Highway Africa is featuring workshops on Bringing down the Barriers with Interactive Audio Programming and Mobile Phones, Civil Society Use of Mapping Tools and Mass Media Takeup, and Digital Media and the Right to Language. (Full program here)
GroundReport.com is a platform for the kind of journalism that has many names: hyperlocal journalism, citizen journalism, wiki journalism. Rachel Sterne's idea is to have a website where anyone can just sign up and submit articles, and become an instant citizen reporter. Submitted content goes through a plagiarism filter and a group of editors will edit before any content goes live.
Based on the number of hits and the ranking of the author, good articles get filtered to the front page, and the hope is that bad articles will stay at bay with bad rankings and scarcely any hits. Contributors are compensated based on article rankings but compensation averages only a few cents.
As smartphones proliferate around the world, we ought to remain cognizant of what information we share on those phones with applications, application developers, advertisers and marketers. Phones are incredibly personal, always on, and always with most of us. As a result, they can reveal sensitive information. In fact, it is time for smartphone users to put pressure on application developers, platform providers, and eventually legislators to protect private and potentially sensitive information.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently published a paper on locational privacy. Because smartphones know where we are (using GPS, and if not, using applications such as Google’s My Location service), they can reveal a lot of information about activities, patterns of behaviour, and relationships we have.
Af the Afghani elections are coming up this week, there are a projects focusing on the election and citizen media coverage that we like to note.
First, as Taliban has intensified violence and has threatened to disrupt the elections and "kill those who vote," the Afghani government has called for reporters to avoid coverage of violence so that Afghanis aren't scared away from polling stations. Meanwhile, associations such as the Independent Journalist Association of Afghanistan have refused to take the order and has promised to continue reporting. The ban on reporting is phrased as a "request" in English, and as "strictly forbidden" in Dari (good synopsis of ban and violence here).
As we explore the role of mobile media for the Mobile Media Toolkit project, we are delighted at the coverage on National Public Radio's mobile section on its "Inside NPR" blog. NPR, a public radio conglomerate in the United States, has made some forays into the mobile world, mostly with its applications on smartphones.
As Afghanistan's second democratic elections nears on August 20th, journalists are gearing up for fair and accurate reporting. The NGO Nai and the media development organization Internews have trained journalists and civil society workers over the past few months in fair and accurate reporting. Training includes, according to Internews, "active learning practices, the understanding of regulatory information on all aspects of the elections, and the importance of fair reportage."
The Role of New Media in the Iranian Elections data sheet 3085 Views
Author:
Center for International Media Assistance
Publication Date:
Aug 2009
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Abstract:
New media technologies played a major role in the events leading up to and following the 2009 Iranian elections and are likely to continue to have a tremendous impact. Social networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogging have changed the way Iranian citizens communicate with each other as well as with the outside world. From cell phone cameras capturing scenes of violence that otherwise would go unreported to Twitter feeds used to organize massive protests, new media have forever changed the nature of citizen participation, not just in Iran, but throughout the world.
Despite the impact of these technologies during the Iranian elections, relatively little definitive information has been gathered about their specific role in the elections and subsequent protests. What are the implications of these new technologies for democracy in Iran? How have both the opposition and the government used these new tools against each other in what some call an “Internet battlefield”? Do the users of new media adequately represent the Iranian population? How has the Iranian government attempted to censor or curb the use of these new tools?
In presentations and discussions during a panel discussion held by the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA), new media practitioners, Iran specialists, and interested observers attempted to clarify the role of new media in the Iranian elections and the implications of these technologies for future democratic movements.
Avaaj Otalo - A Voice-Based Community Forum data sheet 22476 Views
In places such as rural India, small-scale farmers struggle to meet the challenges of fierce global competition, increasing costs of farm inputs, water shortages, and new diseases and pests brought on by a changing climate. To deal with these challenges, information has become a critical input to farming operations: faced with rapidly changing conditions, farmers need market information, timely technical advice, and alerts on new and improved techniques. There are currently few sources for reliable, timely knowledge. Television and radio have achieved remarkable penetration in rural areas and stand as an effective means of information dissemination. However, without a platform to discuss, debate, and relate personal experience, information is not actionable.
Our excellent and long-time MobileActive.org friends over at Development Seed have released a new light-weight open source SMS gateway that can run on a laptop or a USB stick.
From Development Seed's Tm McWright: "Using an GSM modem or cellphone, SlingshotSMS will send and receive text messages on behalf of your web application. It builds on the work of pygsm, an excellent Python library for dealing with AT-compatible modems. What this means is that SlingshotSMS is compatible with Mac, Windows, and Linux, and can interface with a wide range of GSM modems and cell phones - including many sub-$200 field-ready modems like the one we used for testing when we were field-testing last week as part of our participation in Camp Roberts experiments. All code is available on github.
Here is a breakdown of the SlingshotSMS workflow...
In Pakistan even the cheapest mobile phones, those without cameras or other advanced features, come with the ability to listen to FM radio. Every day, and especially during cricket matches, people walk around the streets with their phones pressed to their ears, tuned into their local stations, says Huma Yusuf, a journalist based in Pakistan.
Avaaj Otalo ("voice-based community forum") is a system for farmers to access relevant and timely agricultural information over the phone. The system was designed in the summer of 2008 as a collaboration between IBM India Research Laboratory and Development Support Center (DSC), an NGO in Gujarat, India. By dialing a phone number and navigating through simple audio prompts, farmers can record questions, review and respond to others, or access content published by agricultural experts and institutions. In addition to the Q&A forum, Avaaj Otalo includes an announcements board of headline-like snippets updated regularly by DSC staff, and a radio archive to listen to past episodes of DSC's popular weekly radio program.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a server
Key Features :
IVR system for information access and sharing of experiences amongst small-scale farmers in rural India.
Radio and ICT in West Africa: Connectivity and Use data sheet 3259 Views
Author:
Malick Ndiaye, Kwami Ahiabenu II, Abdourahame Ousmane, Hippolyte Djiwan, et. al
Publication Date:
Oct 2008
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Abstract:
Radio remains the most appropriate communication medium for social and development communication in Africa. This study consists of carrying out a base-line study of West African radio connectivity to ICT (internet, satellite, computer, digital storage tools, etc.), analyzing the uses implemented, identifying the constraints and opportunities, and making recommendations to the different stakeholders.
The study concentrates on seven (7) targeted countries (Ghana, Benin, Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso & Niger) and concerns all radio stations (public, community, commercial and religious). Two hundred and twenty (220) radio stations took part in the survey. The main tools of research used were questionnaires, interviews and documentary analysis.
The results reveal that overall the average rate of access to the internet by radio stations in the seven (7) countries studied is 51.8 %, with a large disparity according to the country and type of radio. Indeed, while the rate of connectivity is 72.2% for private commercial radio on the one hand, it is limited to 31.5% for community or non-profit making radio. On the other hand, at a country-wide level, Ghanaian radio has a 93.5% connectivity rate, Senegalese radio 89.7%, whilst only 20% of radio stations in Sierra Leone are connected. In Ghana and Senegal, nearly all commercial radio stations are connected. In addition, 72.7% of Senegalese community radio stations have access to the internet (75% of them have an ADSLline), in contrast to only 8.3% of Nigerien community stations.
The rate of connectivity for all radio stations in Burkina Faso, Benin and Mali, is 61.5%, 55% and 34% respectively. It is thanks to ADSLtechnology that the majority of stations in the sub-region are connected, in particular Senegal, where more than 92 % of stations have access to the worldwide network. As illustrated by the cost of internet access, in certain countries internet use has become more and more accessible, but is limited to regions with good infrastructure.
The strong mobile phone penetration on the continent allows stations to use it as an indispensable tool for reporting and communicating with listeners; this has contributed to today’s large number of radio listeners. Even though around seventy (70) radio websites have been identified (the majority of them with domain names matching the names of the stations), their presence remains minimal and precarious on the internet. In most countries, live broadcasts on the internet are very unstable (streaming is usually inaccessible) or non-existent, despite being advertised. In addition, a large number of websites have very few - or even no - content.
Mobile value-added services, in particular SMS, used by 83.8% of stations surveyed, have had great success amongst the local population. These new services are considered important tools of interaction between radio stations and listeners and are also a potential source of substantial revenue for radio business.
Convergence between ICTs and radio has brought about results including new multi-use supports which contribute to making radio programmes accessible everywhere throughout the world, and whose coverage, until recently was limited by FM transmitter capacity. The study has shown that in the countries concerned, training in ICTs is not done regularly. In fact, a quarter of the radio stations surveyed stated that their employees have never followed any training. This explains the low level of ICT skills which greatly limits the development of digital products and services in radio stations. Due either to a lack of information or familiarity with ICT, it has also been observed that there is some confusion between free and proprietary software, and even about what kind of internet connection the radio station has.
Panos Institute West Africa released a report in October 2008 exploring the connectivity of West African Radio Stations to the Internet, and their use of other information and communication technology including integration with mobile. The report presents results of a survey that was conducted in 220 radio stations in Ghana, Benin, Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, and Niger.
Radio, which "remains the most appropriate communication medium for social and development communication in Africa", does not have great online presence, but has higher use of mobile phone technology. The results vary drastically with type of radio station and the country it is operating in.
Question Box is an "all-questions-answered" service that attempts to democratize the world’s information for all the world’s people. Unlike many services that target only mobile or web users, Question Box takes into account the fact that some people are illiterate, some people are too poor to afford even a mobile phone, and some people (often times women) are shut out from communicating with certain people or information sources.
The service was started by Rose Shuman a few years ago when she got the idea to offer the internet and information found in things like Wikipedia to people who couldn’t read or who were otherwise disenfranchised. Since then the service has been piloted in many locations in India and is currently being piloted in Uganda.
Public Radio Player, the new version of the old Public Radio Tuner, is a free application that allows users to access over 300 public radio stations across the United States. With a few swipes to the screen of an iPhone or iPod Touch, users can listen to live shows or recorded podcasts from locations of their choice.
