Talk to aAqua
questions, which were answered
About
A program on German television,
namely “Abenteuer Wissen” (“The
Adventure of Knowledge”), made
us aware for the problems of Indian
farmers. The report explained their
desperate situation, which can be
caused by crop failure, storms or
false methods of cultivation. As a
result, they either have to migrate
to the cities or they will be eco-
nomically ruined which sadly but
frequently results in farmers com-
mitting suicide.
aAqua
To counteract this development,
miscellaneous organizations have
decided to help the population
with their knowledge. One of them
is the agricultural institute ICRISAT
(International Crops Research In-
stitute for the Semi-Arid Tropics),
an organization engaging in crop
research and cultivation methods.
This institution made us aware
of the aAqua project (Almost All
Questions Answered), in which
they are engaged as well. This is
a web forum where Indian farm-
ers can pose specific agricultural
by a pool of volunteer experts. To
reach a higher coverage, a ques-
tion-and-answer service based on
mobile text messages was inte-
grated. However, this application
was not used widely. One reason
is the high rate of illiteracy in rural
areas of India. For this reason, we
wish to provide access to aAqua
for the illiterates and have there-
fore developed Talk to aAqua.
Talk to aAqua
With our approach, a farmer can
leave a question as a voice mes-
sage on a web forum.
The basic technology for such
a service is a telephone-based
speech-dialog system to overcome
the barrier of illiteracy with a sim-
ple structure-and-speech recogni-
tion. The requests to the pool of
experts will be presented in a con-
sistent manner on the web forum,
so that they can answer via text
(with automatic text-to-speech-
transformation) or voice recording.
The questioner will automatically
be notified about new answers,
either by phone or text message.
The messages can be
listened to at any time
by landline or mobile
telephone and follow-
up questions can be
asked afterwards.
Another feature of
our application is an
information system
that uses up-to-date
data and reliable knowledge sourc-
es. This enables new opportunities,
for example, warnings of specific
atmospheric conditions or descrip-
tions of effective agricultural culti-
vation methods.
The complete TaAqua service is
equipped with a multi-user mode
to enable the sharing of a tele-
phone by multiple users to reduce
costs and to reach more farmers
in need.
The IIT (Indian Institute of Tech-
nology) in Bombay, as operator of
the aAqua platform, is interested
in our application. At the moment,
they are evaluating the capability
and possible scenarios for the us-
age of our solution.
Our project Talk to aAqua enables
an improved access to the informa-
tion platform aAqua, and hence, a
broader audience is able to use this
service. This is achieved by adapt-
ing the spoken word, which is the
simplest form of communication.
Through this approach, we enable
a significant proportion of the In-
dian agricultural population to ac-
cess a large knowledge base and
help them to improve their living
circumstances.