Saturday, October 25, 2008

Literacy & Mobile

was thinking... on the applicability of reach that the mobile and mobile networks has into the rural hinterlands...

if we can use mobile as the device ... as the magic lamp as Mr Rajesh Jain refers to... this magical device can be used to send educational snippets daily onto the learners... here in focus the illiterates... people who do not have yet the ability to read and write would require technology/application that would convert text-to-speech and speech-to-text on basic mobile phones...with multiple language options...

the education service provider/social organization, say like the Tata Literacy's Computer-Based Functional Literacy (CBFL) program... can use the mobile services to send across their literacy modules to learners... SMS being the prime method... and then the application will convert the text to speech... 

a daily SMS... on some aspect ... like alphabet/numbers/words/basic calculation will help make people literated within a small time span... and rural india is already getting hooked to the mobile for both connectivity and business prposes. 

Mobile with SMS with speech conversion applications with vernacular language capabilities...will then prove to be the bed-rock on which we can have a literate india... and it is just the beginning.... all lot of further services will then follow....

probably the mobile service provider may buy the idea of giving the service free ... for a period of say 3/6 months... by which the user will become at least moderately capable of reading/writing... and once she/he gets hooked to the power of literacy... she/he will be using the SMS and other data services for the rest of their lives...

what say you... i find to be a killer application ... with wide applicability... with great social value... and eventually even greater business value...


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