Paul Rankin: Voices in Your Hand, a pilot project developed by Philips
Paul Rankin has been working on ‘Voices in Your Hand’, an economically-sustainable humanitarian project to create a simple, voice-email handset and cheap audio services to help urban shantytowns and isolated rural areas in the developing world, overcoming illiteracy or minority languages. The pilot will be completed during 2005.
The following is an extract taken from the Philips’ web site on the project , see Philips’ article about showcasing of the Voice in Your Hand pilot.
Brazil: Voices in Your Hand
Article by Royal Philips Electronics
Our Voices in Your Hand is a pilot project running in Recife, Brazil, to bring digital connectivity to people at the bottom of the economic pyramid. With Voices in Your Hand, people in this underserved community - many are illiterate - can communicate with others and have access to information even though fixed-line or wireless phonesare beyond their economic reach.
Using modified MP3 players, people can listen to personalized web casts of audio information offline in their homes, talk back and use voice email. Then they visit a public utility point to link their sets to the Internet. The customer here may be a family or a village, rather than an individual.
During 2004 we conducted extensive market research as well as a social impact survey. We have developed partnerships to supply content and Internet service and distribute handsets to the potential users. In November the rollout started providing 10 handsets per week to a representative group of users in the community of Chão de Estrelas, and plan to have distributed a total of 250 handsets by March 2005. Each handset can have multiple users and the pilot targets a level of approximately 500 users.
The pilot will be completed mid 2005, learning will be captured and results will be used to test the feasibility of possible scale up scenarios.
June 9th, 2005 at 9:59 am
Were would we go to find out more about this interesting project. How is it working out ? What technical and market limitations have you found?
October 17th, 2005 at 12:51 pm
Philips field testing in the favelas of Brazil
Voices in Your Hand is a humanitarian project, sponsored by Philips Electronics, to create a simple, voice-email handset and cheap audio services to help urban shantytowns and isolated rural areas in the developing world, overcoming illiteracy or mino…
October 20th, 2005 at 5:03 am
[…] Further reporting by WorldChanging, Paul Rankin (a Philips Research fellow) and by Philips itself. […]
April 9th, 2006 at 11:32 pm
I would like to know more about this project . challenges and successes.Kindly get back to me asap.