A web of sound
发声网页

Talk about that
网站，说一说

Jun 18th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Websites that use the spoken word will empower the illiterate
发声网站，让文盲也可以上网

THE internet, wonderful though it is, reinforces one of life’s fundamental divisions: that between the literate and the illiterate. Most websites, even those heavy with video content, rely on their users being able to read and—if interactive—write. Building your own site certainly does.

英特网，自是精彩纷呈，同时也加剧了那些受教育的人和文盲之间在人生里的根本分歧。大多数网站，即便是那些加载了大量视频文件的网页，也需要浏览者具备阅读的能力，如需进行互动还要求浏览者会打字。要是想建立个人网站就更是如此了。

Guruduth Banavar, the director of IBM’s India Research Laboratory, wanted to allow people who struggle with literacy to create websites. So he and his colleagues have devised a system based on what is known as “voice extensible markup language”, a cousin of the hypertext markup language used on conventional websites, that allows a website to be built and operated more or less by voice alone.

IBM印度研究实验室主任古鲁都斯•巴纳瓦尔希望通过他的研究，能让那些没有读写能力的人也能建立网站。为此，他和他的同事们一起开发了一种基于大家熟知的“语音拓展标记语言”的系统。语音拓展标记语言可谓是超文本标记语言近亲，后者被广泛应用于传统网站的建设中，但是语音拓展标记语言从某种程度上允许操作者仅通过语言来架设网站。

The “spoken web” Dr Banavar hopes to conjure into existence will be based on mobile phones, which are already proving an effective alternative to computers for obtaining information online in poor countries. As well as making voice calls, people can text one another and, if their phones are up to the job, get access to the web. Across the developing world there are a number of successful banking and money-transfer services that rely on mobile phones rather than computers.

巴纳瓦尔博士希望通过神奇的科技，让对话网页成为现实。传统的移动电话在欠发达国家被用于在线获取信息和信息沟通，已经成为电脑的不二代替者，而这种对话网页正式以移动电话作为媒介的。通过移动电话，人们不仅可以拨打语音电话，还可以向对方发送文本，如果手机功能允许的话，人们甚至可以通过它接入网络。目前在发展中国家里，就有很多银行和转账中介商是通过移动电话，而不是电脑来展开业务。

Dr Banavar, however, thinks mobiles could be made to work much harder. His voice sites are hosted on standard computer servers and behave much like conventional websites. At their most basic they are designed for local use, acting as portals through which people can find out such things as when the mobile hospital will next visit their village, the price of rice in the local market and which wells they should use for irrigation. Instead of typing in a web address, the user rings the website up. Then, with a combination of voice commands and key presses, he navigates through a spoken list of topics and listens to subjects of interest.

巴纳瓦尔博士认为，移动电话还可以被赋予更多的使命。他的语言网站放在传统的电脑服务器上，运作起来也如同传统的网站 。人们设计这些网站的初衷，是要服务于当地人民，作为信息门户网站供人们找找所需信息，诸如移动医院什么时候到自己的村子来，当前市场上大米的价格怎样以及那一口井是可以用来灌溉作物的。所不同的是，人们不需要键入网站地址，而是用电话拨打这个地址。人们通过语音指令和按键输入的联合操作，电话里传出的语音热点栏目列表会自动为你导航，然后你可以根据自己的喜好来收听。

That is useful, but not startlingly different from the sort of call-centre hell familiar to anyone who has tried to get information out of a large company by telephone. What makes Dr Banavar’s approach different is that, by selecting an appropriate option with the handset, the user can add content to a voice site by recording a comment that is then made available to others. This can then be accessed as one of the “latest additions” or “most listened to” items in a spoken sub-menu. More important still, though, is that people can use a mobile phone to build their own voice sites—a process that, in trials conducted by the laboratory, even a non-expert could learn in as little as ten minutes.

这听起来很不错，但似乎又和那些通过电话为人们提供信息服务的呼叫信息中心没有特别大的区别。真正让巴纳瓦尔博士的成果与众不同的地方在于：人们可通过移动电话，对需要的选项进行选择后，可以通过评论录音功能向网站添加进内容，这一功能对所有人都是开放的。因此，人们就可以在对话网站的自栏目中找到“最新评论”或是“热门收听”等板块了。除此之外，更令人惊奇的是，人们还可以通过移动电话搭建属于自己的语音网站，当然，目前这一项目正处于实验室试行阶段，如果成功，那么一个网站外行就能在10分钟内学会搭建网站。

The voice of the people
人们用语音来上网

To build a site the user first selects a suitable template. The system then talks him through the bells and whistles he might wish to add to that template. A carpenter or autorickshaw driver, for example, can advertise his services, receive and confirm offers of work and even undertake basic commercial transactions through such a site. And the site can store offers of work when its owner is unavailable—as often happens in places where several people share a handset.

要建立一个网站，用户首先要选择一个模板。系统会同操作者通过铃音和哨音进行互动，以帮助用户确定哪些是要加入模板的内容。比如，一个木匠或一个司机可以在上面发布个人的服务信息，接收并确认作业订单，甚至可以实现简单的在线交易。当操作被搁置，系统会自动对作业订单进行储存，考虑到在有些地方，经常会有几个人共用一部手机的情况。

Like a more conventional website, a voice site has a mechanism by which information can be linked together and browsed, both backwards and forwards. The system IBM employs to achieve this, the hyperspeech transfer protocol (HSTP), is similar in principle to the hypertext transfer protocol that provides links from one conventional website to another. The HSTP allows, for instance, someone listening to an item on a voice site to hear another linked item and then return to the first one and continue listening from where he left off.

像传统的网站一样，语音网站同样可以实现信息的链接和浏览，可以前进，可以后退。IBM实验室通过超文本传输协定（HSTP）来实现这一功能，它与传统的超文本传输协定类似，可以提供从过一个网站到另一个网站的链接。举例来说，HSTP 能够让人们在收听一个语音网站的同时链接到另外一个语音网站，然后再回到自己之前所收听的内容，继续收听。

India, one of the world’s fastest-growing mobile-phone markets, is an obvious place to try all this out. Although more than a third of its population of 1.2 billion now have a handset, they are often basic devices shared among families and friends. IBM is therefore carrying out trials of the spoken web in several parts of India—and, in collaboration with various other groups, in other countries.

印度是全球手机市场快速增长的市场之一，非常适合这一成果的应用。尽管目前有超过国民人口（12亿人口）三分之一的人拥有手机，手机对于他们来说是家人和朋友间相互交流的基本通讯工具。因此，印度IBM实验室将开发出的语音网站在印度的部分地区进行试验，并与其他国家的其他类似团体进行合作交流。

Users will have to make calls, and those calls will cost money. But, Dr Banavar thinks, there are many ways of paying for them. Public-service sites such as local portals might be toll-free and subsidised by governments. Commercial sites could take a small percentage of any transaction carried out over them. Advertising might also provide revenue. It would, after all, be more difficult for the listener to screen out than the visual adverts seen on a conventional site.

用户要使用语音网站就必须拨打电话，这势必会产生通话费。但是巴纳瓦尔博士认为，话费的支付可由多方来完成。提供公共服务的网站，诸如本地门户网站可以免去部分话费，由政府出资一部分。而商业网站可以从产生的交易中获取一定百分比的利润，同时，广告可以带来收益，不过对于一个收听语音网站的用户来说，要屏蔽其中的广告，可就比传统的视觉网站要麻烦多了。