From DNA Ahmedabad:
Tapan Parikh, an assistant professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information, was awarded the five-year grant by the National Science Foundation and, with his team, will use the money to explore ways the voice-based interface can be made more user-friendly for low-literacy users. According to Neil Patel, a PhD student at Stanford University, farmers implemented advice taken from peer farmers more quickly than advice taken from authority figures or experts. “Currently in rural India, information access is very top-down,” Patel said. “Farmers hear advice through the radio or from a government agricultural worker but not from one another. One of the goals of the project is to give the opportunity for rural people to provide advice to others.”
Read the full article here.
