Mobile phones satisfy our universal need to connect with the world…unless you happen to live in a rural area without cell coverage or your keyboard doesn’t support your native written language. Then what do you do?

Over the past few years, several initiatives have demonstrated the power of simple mobile services to help further development of rural economies. However, most of those were based on SMS, available on most phones, but not conducive for use by people with low literacy or a speaking language not supported by a phone keyboard.

In attempt to overcome those obstacles and help connect farmers, producers and radio stations in the Republic of Mali, a landlocked country in Western Africa without a telephony infrastructure, the EU-funded VOICES project turned to Voxeo for one of their independent platforms.

The VOICES team (staffed by the Web Foundation and VU University) has developed a stand-alone platform powered by a solar pane (see photo) based on Voxeo products. The laptop hosts the complete environment (LAMP) plus a Voxeo Prophecy IVR server for the voice platform. For the telephony hardware, an appliance called Office Route with four GSM ports was utilized. It is believed that this is the first stand-alone VoiceXML browser platform that doesn’t require power.

VOICES is a collaboration of 12 partners from France, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Senegal, South Africa, Portugal and Mali. While the current focus of one the targeted pilot projects is the broadcast of agricultural information, the sky’s the limit when people are given a voice.

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  1. Unlocking access to New York State Senate legislation info through IM, SMS, Twitter, voice via Voxeo IMified/Prophecy
  2. Launching your own *platform* for voice applications using Voxeo’s computing cloud
  3. Our Prophecy product included in new book “Mobile Web Development”

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