The proliferation of rural mobile in India is creating the next big opportunity in the VAS space, especially for the companies which are creating information and M-commerce solutions custom tailored for this market. Majority of rural mobile subscribers don’t use VAS services like SMS and the main reason being unable to read.
IBM India has now unveiled initial rollout of one of it’s “Five Innovations That Will Change Our Lives in the Next Five Years“, it’s latest innovation HSTP is surely going to change hundreds and millions of lives of rural mobile consumers not just in India but world over.
What is HSTP?
HSTP is Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol, IBM defines Hyperspeech as a voice fragment in a voice application that is a hyperlink to a voice fragment in another voice application, similar to what hypertext is for HTTP.
Basically HSTP allows users to create voice sites and enables voice-driven transactions that can span multiple cross enterprise voice applications providing a seamless browsing experience to the telephony user.
“People will talk to the web and the web will respond. The research technology is analogous to the internet. Unlike personal computers it will work on mobile phones where people can simply create their voice sites,” IBM India Research Laboratory Associate Director Manish Gupta said.
How are applications on HSTP implemented?
The voice applications are authored in Java and VoiceXML-JSP using IBM Rational 6.0 IDE as the development platform and the applications are deployed in the ApacheTomcat 5.0 application server as shown in the Figure below. This server is connected to the PSTN network through a Dialogic card that forms the Computer Telephony Interface (CTI). A Genesys Voice Browser is used for interpreting the
VoiceXML and for interacting with the CTI. Genesys utilizes Websphere Voice Server to enable speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis when required. The voice applications are represented by a phone number. When a user calls this number, the application is rendered by the GenesysVoice Browser and presented to the user.
IBM has currently developed two applications a tele-grocery store and a tele-payment gateway.
HSTP if rightly tailored for rural mobile is not only going to change the lives of rural consumers but is going to be the next big thing in the Rural VAS.
