We will present our findings from a study of the landscape of voice interfaces in India, and seek feedback towards finalisation of the same.The study, supported by Mozilla Corporation, examines the adaptation and innovation with voice interfaces in Indian languages,and discusses possible policy and design interventions through the lenses of privacy of users,inclusion of non-English languages,and accessibility of interfaces.We will present a visual mapping of actors in the Indian voice interface landscape, and three case studies focusing on key technology developers:Common Voice (community driven open source), Indic TTS (public funded), and Niki (commercial).The session will have four segments - a general introduction to the study and key design and policy concerns, presentation of observations from the case studies, an open discussion about the study,and a final segment to seek the participants views on the futures of voice interfaces in non-English languages.
Mozfest gives us an opportunity to share our works and seek feedback from a wide international audience with various technical and research expertise in the field of voice technologies. We would like to continue our conversations with the participants after the event to explore possibilities of studying the challenges and opportunities with voice interfaces in non-English languages in different parts of the world. This will help us envision future looking research questions and cross-country or cross-languages comparative analyses. We hope that our prompt on the future of voice interfaces will lead to interesting collaborations and opportunities with the participants
How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session?:We plan to facilitate discussion across multiple breakout groups during the last two segments of the session. The number of breakout groups may be increased to accommodate a high number of participants. Four members of our project team will be available to facilitate the session, and we may invite additional CIS colleagues to moderate breakout groups if needed. We look forward to making effective use of interactive features of the conference software to encourage engagement by participants throughout the session via text (during first two segments) and audio/video (during last two). The final report and website will be shared with registered participants beforehand to enable effective interaction during the session.
I am a Policy Officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, researching on AI, privacy, and voice interfaces.
Saumyaa is a designer and researcher. She works on critically examining the role of design in digital products and services at the Centre for Internet and Society.
Researcher with the Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, India