Mobile voice based services for agricultural extension services at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP)
Mahajan, Gururaj (2019)
2019
Tietojenkäsittelytieteiden tutkinto-ohjelma
Informaatioteknologian ja viestinnän tiedekunta - Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2019-06-03
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-201906192121
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-201906192121
Tiivistelmä
The rapid technological advancements and innovations in mobile phone technology has connected the entire global population, still majority of the people across globe are not connected with the internet and providing information to this unreached masses is a major challenge. However the mobile phones are the best medium to reach this mass population and voice is the best medium to provide information to this entire unreached population. This population includes farming community across the world. We chose to rural India as our case study. Further we conducted research and field study in order to understand how the voice based services helps to disseminate agricultural information to the unreached farmers, especially to illiterate farmers.
This research is the result of joint multi-disciplinary and first of its kind Indo-Finnish collaboration of University of Tampere, Finland, University of Agricultural Sciences Dharwad, India and IBM Research Lab, India. Together we conducted, empirical field study during year 2011, by interviewing participants in surrounding villages of University of Agricultural Sciences Dharwad. While there were no such previous attempts being made for the agricultural extension service in the part of India, Dharwad region, situated Northern Karnataka, this field study is first of its kind.
It is evident from our research field study that, the illiterate farmers were comfortable and very quickly able to use our voice-site prototype and all participants unanimously appreciated and accepted our research efforts and all of them acknowledged our Raitarind Raitara Dhwani (voice-site prototype). This shows that the dissemination of agricultural extension information services and mobile voice based services through mobile phone using spoken web as platform are acceptable to the farming community.
This research is the result of joint multi-disciplinary and first of its kind Indo-Finnish collaboration of University of Tampere, Finland, University of Agricultural Sciences Dharwad, India and IBM Research Lab, India. Together we conducted, empirical field study during year 2011, by interviewing participants in surrounding villages of University of Agricultural Sciences Dharwad. While there were no such previous attempts being made for the agricultural extension service in the part of India, Dharwad region, situated Northern Karnataka, this field study is first of its kind.
It is evident from our research field study that, the illiterate farmers were comfortable and very quickly able to use our voice-site prototype and all participants unanimously appreciated and accepted our research efforts and all of them acknowledged our Raitarind Raitara Dhwani (voice-site prototype). This shows that the dissemination of agricultural extension information services and mobile voice based services through mobile phone using spoken web as platform are acceptable to the farming community.