Illiterate but want to use a mobile phone? Not to worry -- help is at hand, courtesy Reliance Infocomm. The Ambani company is launching speech-based applications. Quite simply, that means that an illiterate villager or urban dweller has merely to mention the name of the person he or she wants to talk to and, presto, the mobile phone will do the rest of the job -- by scanning a Reliance phone directory.
More to the point, an illiterate person can speak in any of several Indian languages and dialects. So a villager in the western ghats of Maharashtra (who speaks a different Marathi dialect) can speak in his dialect into the phone, without pressing too many buttons.
Nor does he have to buy a new mobile phone. Says Mahesh Prasad, president, applications and solutions group, Reliance Infocomm: "We are working on a network-based technology that is independent of handsets. This will mean that the current handsets can be used to recognise and transmit voice signals."
Prasad declines to say when the service will be launched, but others expect it to be launched in a few months.
How do these voice-based commands work? The handset will recognise the command, translate it into text, retrieve the phone number of