The emergence of IBM’s Spoken Web, a mobile innovation that eliminates literacy as a precursor to access the internet, is a game-changer in the ICT for Agriculture sector.

Unlike other efforts to bridge the global information divide, even people with limited to no functional literacy skills will find Spoken Web user-friendly. With nearly 800 million functional illiterates around the world, the inability to read remains a major impediment to the use of ICT4D. This is most acute in the most remote parts of the developing world where livelihoods and agriculture are inextricably linked.

The mobile innovation is essentially a world wide network of VoiceSites joined to make the Spoken Web. Its most essential hardware is a telephone, which people use to browse VoiceSites by saying keywords, also known as VoiLinks.

This rapidly progressing network of voice recordings is predicated on a system called VoiGem, which simplifies the process of creating voice-based applications. VoiGem is unique compared to existing interactive voice response technology because it allows users to create their own VoiceSites that consists of voice pages (VoiceXML files) that may be linked. Each page is identified by the user’s phone number. This identification mode allows the user to easily edit VoiceSites and pages from their phone.

The mobile-centric nature of this development reflects a global trend and complements a development need, particularly for agriculture. Although small scale farmers, scattered across some of the most far-flung places around the globe, make up a large portion of the 5 billion people without access to the internet and computers, a growing number of these people own cellphones. In fact, farmers constitute a strong contingent among the 3 in 4 people worldwide who own mobiles. Although only a fifth of those with mobile subscriptions worldwide have access to mobile broadband services, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) “predicts that within the next five years, more people will hop onto the Web from laptops and mobile gadgets than from desktop computers”.

As more farmers join the growing legion of wired folks, they will have faster and more reliable opportunities to access and share information. This development will reduce information asymmetries, structure and strengthen agricultural markets by bringing the internet to parts of the world where small scale farmers, consumers, middlemen and traders have limited knowledge about where to access and trade food.

The technology is also culturally appropriate given the oral nature of many cultures in the developing world. Farmers will also have the opportunity to efficaciously share valuable indigenous farming retentions.

As with most things, the Spoken Web also comes with challenges. Chief among the challenges is that though voice-recognition technology can match search terms against a previously processed index of recorded voice sites, it presents cumbersome results. However, the technology is being refined to be more precise. Precision is especially important because farmers and other end-users will not be able to retain all the information found on lengthy voice pages/sites, and they may not have the literacy skills to jot down points. Interestingly though, the Spoken Web comes with a fast-forward feature that enables the user to listen as if they were skim-reading.

Despite these challenges, the technology has been successfully piloted in eight Indian villages. It is now a central part of farming and health-care delivery in four Indian states, parts of Thailand and Brazil.