Kasadaka: A Voice Service Development Platform to Bridge the Web’s Digital Divide André Baart Anna Bon Victor de Boer Amsterdam Business School, Network Institute, Vrije Universiteit Computer Science Department, Vrije Universiteit van Amsterdam Amsterdam Universiteit Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands Amsterdam, The Netherlands Amsterdam, The Netherlands a.h.j.baart@uva.nl a.bon@vu.nl v.de.boer@vu.nl Wendelien Tuyp Hans Akkermans Centre for International Cooperation, Network Institute, Vrije Universiteit Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands Amsterdam, The Netherlands w.tuijp@vu.nl hans.akkermans@akmc.nl ABSTRACT Divide’ [2]. The majority lives in the Global South, often in remote The World Wide Web is a crucial open public space for knowledge rural regions, under low-resource conditions and with poor or even sharing, content creation and application service provisioning for absent infrastructures. billions on this planet. Although it has a global reach, still more However, needs for knowledge sharing, locally relevant content than three billion people do not have access to the Web, the major- and application service provisioning are certainly no less beyond ity of whom live in the Global South, often in rural regions, under the current borders of the Web. low-resource conditions and with poor infrastructure. However, To overcome the Digital Divide, various policies are promoted the need for knowledge sharing, content creation and application to improve global access to Internet, Web and its vast arsenal of service provisioning is no less on the other side of this Digital Di- resources. A prominent one, for which quite large funds have been vide. In this paper we describe the Kasadaka platform that supports made available by donors such as the World Bank, is the attempt to easy creation of local-content and voice-based information services, roll out forms of “affordable internet” to currently unconnected re- targeted at currently ‘unconnected’ populations and matching the gions.1 Basically, the underlying idea is a form of relatively straight- associated resource and infrastructural requirements. The Kasadaka forward technology transfer from advanced countries to developing platform and especially its Voice Service Development Kit supports and emerging regions [1, 3, 4]. the formation of an ecosystem of decentralized voice-based infor- Our research focuses on information exchange and knowledge mation services that serve local populations and communities. This sharing support for smallholder and family farmers in the African is, in fact, very much analogous to the services and functionalities Sahel (including e.g. Mali, Burkina Faso, northern Ghana). In a offered by the Web, but in regions where Internet and Web are country such as Mali, around 80% of the population depend for absent and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. their livelihood on work in small susbsistence agriculture in remote rural regions where there is no Internet, very limited electricity, and KEYWORDS high levels of low-literacy (around 50% on average, for women even significantly higher). Under these conditions it is highly unlikely digital divide, low literacy, sub-Saharan Africa, voice-based services, that a technology transfer policy of internet roll-out to bridge the low-resource hardware, services development software kit Digital Divide will come to fruition in some foreseeable future. This does not imply that nothing can be done. The contribu- 1 INTRODUCTION tion of this paper is that one can, and that it is possible to develop The World Wide Web is a unique public space for knowledge shar- and deliver web-reminescent services for information and knowl- ing, content creation and application service provisioning for bil- edge exchange, but not in a one-size-fits-all technology transfer lions on this planet. Although it has a global reach, still more than approach. It requires a thorough investigation in the field of con- three billion people do not have access to the Web: the ‘Digital ditions, requirements and local specificities. This leads to insights and technical directions that cannot be derived from advanced but Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or far-away technology considerations alone. classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM 2 KASADAKA TECHNICAL must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a IMPLEMENTATION AND EVALUATION fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. , The Kasadaka platform and especially its Voice Service Develop- , ment Kit aims to facilitate the formation of an ecosystem of many © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-x-xxxx-xxxx-x/YY/MM. . . $15.00 1 See: https://webfoundation.org/our-work/projects/alliance-for-affordable-internet/ https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn , , A. Baart et al. Figure 1: Overview of the Kasadaka system architecture decentralized voice-based information services that serve local pop- Both evaluations showed that the Kasadaka platform is suitable ulations and communities. This is, in fact, very much analogous to for the development of simple voice services, by users with minimal the services and functionalities offered by the Web, but in regions programming skills. For more complex voice services, the VSDK where Internet and Web are and will continue to be absent for the does not (yet) provide sufficient functionalities out-of-the box, and foreseeable future. needs to be extended with data models and interactions that are The platform that we propose is called Kasadaka (talking box in specific to the use case. Despite this limitation, the platform clearly a number of northern Ghanaian languages). The platform consists shows potential for the development of (financially) sustainable of a combination of hardware and accompanying software. The voice services in the development context. hardware forming the foundation of the KasaDaka platform is the Raspberry Pi, which is a low-resource computer based on an ARM 3 CONCLUSION processor (like found in many smartphones). The Raspberry Pi The wider aim of the presented Kasadaka platform and its Voice runs Raspbian, a Debian based Linux distribution. To provide the Service Development Kit is to allow the populations on the other Raspberry Pi with connectivity to the local mobile phone network, side of the Digital Divide to share knowledge and create content, a USB 3G modem is used. The total costs of the hardware is around analogous to the advantages that the Web provides. The platform is EUR 60. The main software component that enables the develop- lightweight and is tailored to the harsh circumstances that are found ment of voice services is called the Voice Service Development Kit, in the Global South and takes into account the information needs of or VSDK in short. The VSDK allows for the development of voice the local population. By enabling local voice service development service (prototypes) in a web-based development environment, by and making custom voice services affordable for the world’s rural users without programming skills. The VSDK also generates the poor, Kasadaka enables the formation of a network of decentralized VoiceXML files that describe the interactions in a voice service. To voice services. Such a network has the potential to provide the serve these interactions in a phone call, the Kasadaka runs a stack benefits of the internet to the rural poor, reducing the gap of the of (mostly open-source) applications that provide the different func- Digital Divide and helping to improve the quality of life and well- tions that are required for voice-based interactions. Asterisk, an being in the developing world. open-source telephony exchange application is used in conjunction with chan_dongle and VXI, to provide the voice-based interactions REFERENCES through the local GSM network. [1] 2017. Closing the Access Gap: Innovation to Accelerate Universal Internet Adoption. The evaluation of the VSDK and the Kasadaka platform in general Technical Report. USAID. [2] Christian Fuchs and Eva Horak. 2008. Africa and the digital divide. 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