Banglore: Landlines may look like a piece of relic -- more of a nuisance value waking you up from a clandestine nap that you barely managed. But tech majors have woken up to a goldmine of sorts as it makes business sense to stay wired.
A burgeoning telecom subscriber base of over 500 million in India could mean a windfall for companies like IBM looking to tap fortune at the bottom of the pyramid.
The Big Blue is already piloting a few projects in the country based on the spoken web, which will transform the way people create, build and interact with e-commerce sites. Spoken web, piloted by IBM Research India, helps create voice sites using a mobile or landline.
"IBM is conducting pilot projects in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat by teaming up with NGOs and private companies to take banking to rural areas," said Shanker Annaswamy, managing director, IBM India on Friday. The technology, which is analogous to a URL, allows users to interact with the voice sites and upload their queries using a toll free number. This will spur voice-driven transactions in rural India thereby blurring the digital divide.
At the heart of the technology is a new protocol Hype speech Transfer Protocol that creates voice sites and enables cross-organisational transactions. IBM has also developed a software -- VoiGen -- to run voice-based applications. Creating a Voice site with VoiGen is as simple as calling the system over phone and navigating through the custom options offered.


