Jahanzeb Sherwani

HealthLine: Speech-based access to health information by low-literate users

Health information access by low-literate community health workers is a pressing need of community health programs across the developing world. We present results from a needs assessment we conducted to understand the health information access practices and needs of various types of health workers in Pakistan. We also present a prototype for speech-based health information access, as well as discuss our experiences from a pilot study involving its use by community health workers in a rural health center.

Speech vs. touch-tone: Telephony interfaces for information access by low literate users

Information access by low literate users is a difficult task. Critical information, such as in the field of healthcare, can often mean the difference between life and death. We have developed spoken language interface prototypes aimed at low literate users, and tested them with community health workers in Pakistan. We present results showing that 1) in contrast to previous reports in the literature, well-designed speech interfaces significantly outperform touch-tone equivalents for both low-literate and literate users, and that 2) literacy significantly impacts task success for both modalities.

Viral entertainment as a vehicle for disseminating speech-based services to low-literate users

Entertainment has recently been shown to be a powerful motivator for mastering new technologies. We therefore set out to use viral entertainment to introduce telephone-based, speech-based services to low-literate people in developing countries. We describe Polly, a simple voice manipulation and forwarding system that went viral in Pakistan last year. Seeded once by 32 low-skilled office workers in a Pakistani university, in 3 weeks Polly amassed 2,032 users and 10,629 interactions. From analyzing the traffic and its content, it is evident that Polly has been used extensively for entertainment and social contact, but it has also been put to an unintended use as a voicemail and group messaging facility. This demonstrated the potential for speech based services, and the pent-up demand for entertainment, among our target population. Also of note, Pollys viral spread crossed gender and age boundaries and even established itself in a female population. However, it appears to have not crossed socioeconomic boundaries.

Small-vocabulary speech recognition for resource-scarce languages

We describe a technique for attaining high-accuracy, small-vocabulary speech recognition capability in resource-scarce languages that requires minimal audio data collection and no speech technology expertise. We start with an off-the-shelf commercial speech recognizer that has been trained extensively on a resource-rich language such as English. We then derive phonemic representations for any desired word in any target language, by a process of cross-language phonemic mapping. We show that this results in high accuracy recognition of vocabularies of up to several dozen words -- enough for many development-related applications such as information access, data collection, and simple transactions.

Sublime: A Speech- and Language-Based Information Management Environment

With ever-increasing amounts of information to be organized in peoples daily lives, current mechanisms for personal information management (PIM) leave much room for improvement. We present Sublime, a distributed, multimodal, and mobile environment for speech-based personal information management. In addition to discussing the design philosophy and evolution of the current prototype, this paper describes the functionality and architecture of the system, and indicates future research directions for the project