Home Design Brief Policy Brief Mapping Actors Case Studies Literature Surveys Resources Get Full Report

Design Brief

A cat shown as a person is sitting in front of a computer designing web applications. The cat is wearing blinders and is unable to see the words ‘usability’, ‘accessibility’, ‘rights’, ‘privacy?’, ‘access?’, ‘user experience’, ‘exclusion?’, ‘languages’, ‘text’, ‘dark patterns?’ floating around.

The design brief documents best practices and interventions needed for developing inclusive voice interfaces for Indian languages which keep individuals as the centre, and respect privacy and accessibility needs.

Policy Brief

Cats are shown as people working with a large machine that has levers to indicate accessibility, privacy, and languages.

The policy brief looks at the policy interventions in the development and adoption of voice interfaces, through the lenses of privacy and data protection, inclusion of Indian languages, and accessibility for persons with disabilities.

Mapping Actors

A section of the infographic showing various actors in the voice industry in India.

Case Studies

Various cats speaking into a microphone in different languages.

Common Voice

Common Voice is an open-source dataset of voice recordings in multiple languages that can be used to train speech-enabled applications.

Cat shown as a woman in a saree using the text to speech function on a mobile phone.

Indic TTS

The Indic TTS consortium was developed to create more Indic language speech data to reduce the data divide between English and Indian languages.

Cat shown as an older man speaking into a mobile phone in order to make a bill payment.

Niki

Niki is described as an “artificial intelligence powered conversational commerce startup”, that directly engages with the individual consumer.

Literature Surveys

Evolution and Typology

An illustration of a cat robot with a microphone.

This essay traces the evolution of voice interfaces, including some of its early antecedents and availability in current forms, to offer an outline of the development and adoption of voice technologies as we know them today.

Accessibility and Voice Interfaces

An illustration of a cat figure with outstretched limbs in a circle.

This essay evaluates developments in voice technologies from the perspective of accessibility for persons with disabilities (PwDs), its key challenges and learnings.

Languages and Voice Interfaces

Speech bubbles containing text in a fictitious language.

This article looks at the possibilities and challenges of creating multilingual voice interfaces, with a focus on developments in adoption and use of Indian language voice data and services.

Privacy and Voice Interfaces

An illustration of a half covered eye.

This essay examines questions of voice interfaces and privacy, with a focus on the collection and processing of voice data and concerns related to data regulation and surveillance.

Resources

 

Browse here for a selection of the latest research on voice interfaces, in India and across the world, and to download sections of the report.

Report

Design Brief

Policy Brief

Mapping Actors

Case Study: Common Voice

Case Study: Indic TTS

Case Study: Niki

Literature Survey: Evolution and Typology

Literature Survey: Accessibility and Voice Interfaces

Literature Survey: Languages and Voice Interfaces

Literature Survey: Privacy and Voice Interfaces

Additional Readings

Open Voice Data For All: Making Speech Data In Indian languages More Accessible — Voice Technologies Working Group

“Ok Google: How Is Voice Making Technology More Accessible In India?” — Prashant Gutch

‘‘Okay Google, What About My Privacy?’: User's Privacy Perceptions And Acceptance Of Voice Based Digital Assistants — M.Vimal Kumar, Sujeet Kumar Sharma, Jang Bahadur Singh, Yogesh K.Dwivedi

"Accessibility Came by Accident": Use of Voice-Controlled Intelligent Personal Assistants by People with Disabilities — Alisha Pradhan, Kanika Mehta, Leah Findlater

"Whitepaper - Voice, The Bridge To "Bharat" — Slang Labs

Alexa, Siri, Cortana, And More: An Introduction To Voice Assistants — Matthew B. Hoy

How Might Voice Assistants Raise Our Children? — Cezary Biele, Anna Jaskulska, Wieslaw Kopec, Jaroslaw Kowalski, Kinga Skorupska & Aldona Zdrodowska

Using Voice Interfaces To Make Products More Inclusive? — Cathy Pearl

A Voice User Interface For Low-literacy Users In A Rural Community — Edim, A. Emmanuel, Muyingi, H. Unsung-NSA, Sibanda, K

Design Lessons From Creating A Mobile-Based Community Media Platform In Rural India — Aparna Moitra, Vishnupriya Das, Gram Vaani, Archna Kumar, Aaditeshwar Seth

About the Study

We believe that voice interfaces have the potential to democratise the use of the internet by addressing limitations related to reading and writing on digital text-only platforms and devices. This report examines the current landscape of voice interfaces in India, with a focus on concerns related to privacy and data protection, linguistic barriers, and accessibility for persons with disabilities (PwDs). This project was undertaken with support by the Mozilla Corporation.

Research Team

Research Shweta Mohandas, Saumyaa Naidu, Deepika Nandagudi Srinivasa, Divya Pinheiro, Sweta Bisht

Conceptualisation, Planning, and Research Inputs Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Puthiya Purayil Sneha

Illustration Kruthika NS (Instagram @theworkplacedoodler)

Website Design Saumyaa Naidu

Website Development Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Pranav M Bidare

Review and Editing Puthiya Purayil Sneha, Divyank Katira, Pranav M Bidare, Torsha Sarkar, Pallavi Bedi, Divya Pinheiro

Copy Editing The Clean Copy

Copyright and Credits

Copyright: CIS, India, 2021
License: CC BY 4.0 International

Built using Semantic UI
Barlow and Open Sans by Google Fonts
Social media icons by Font Awesome
Hosted on GitHub