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technologies, which is useful for rapid prototype de-
velopment and evaluation; After set-up, a simple ser-
vice can be developed and tested in under 30 minutes,
however the development of complex use-cases takes
more time. During the course, 80% of the student
groups had successfully built a working voice service
using the VSDK. These 8 applications were devel-
oped for 5 distinct use cases. The included interac-
tion templates allowed the students to quickly build
demonstration prototypes of their voice services. In
order to provide more complex functionality in their
voice services, 78% of the student groups had ex-
tended the functionality of the VSDK with data mod-
els specific to their use case and 67% of the groups
extended the VSDK with additional interaction tem-
plates.
At the end of the course the students were asked
to fill in a short survey on their experience with creat-
ing a voice service and using the VSDK. The goal of
this survey is to learn about the process that the stu-
dents went through as they developed their first voice
service. The survey consisted of statements about the
usefulness of the VSDK, which had to be answered
in a Likert scale. There were also qualitative ques-
tions about VSDK features, improvements and sug-
gestions, as well as questions about their perceptions
during the development process.
This evaluation has shown that the methodology
of building-blocks that is used in the VSDK allows
for the development of simple voice services by inex-
perienced users, which was the goal. It also provided
insight in the limitations and problems of the VSDK.
The main limitation lies in the are of user generated
data management. The VSDK does not yet allow the
creation of custom data models from the development
interface. Other limitations were the limited set of
user interactions provided and the impossibility of the
integration of external data sources. These limitations
prevent the VSDK of being suitable for more complex
voice-services, as ‘traditional’ voice-service develop-
ment skills are still required. In the case of a custom
extension to the VSDK, the functionality of this ex-
tension can be reused throughout the application and
shared with the rest of the development community
(through GitHub). Furthermore the administrator in-
terface can easily utilized by these custom extensions,
which allow voice-service maintainers (without pro-
gramming knowledge) to change settings and other
elements of the extension’s functionality. Thus af-
ter the development of the extension is completed,
maintenance can still be performed by others with-
out knowledge of it’s inner workings, maintaining the
advantage of ease of use offered by the VSDK.
5.2 Case Study: Radio Sikidolo
The results and knowledge of the first evaluation
have been used in the second iteration of the VSDK,
which has been evaluated in collaboration with
Adama Tessougué, the director of Radio Sikidolo in
Konobougou, Mali. For more information see Sec-
tion 3.4 While the evaluation with the students was
sufficient for a general validation of the methodology
of the VSDK, it did not evaluate the VSDK while run-
ning on the hardware of the Kasadaka platform, and
was not in the intended context of a developing coun-
try. This evaluation addresses these limitations: it
evaluates the VSDK and the Kasadaka hardware and
software as a whole, in the intended developing world
context. This validation session was done at Radio
Sikidolo, which has electricity and a relatively sta-
ble Internet connection, the latter of which is however
not used in the Foroba Blon use case. While Adama
is comfortable in the usage of a computer, he does
not have any advanced technical skills, such as pro-
gramming. However as he runs the radio station, he
is familiar with processing audio fragments (using the
open-source application Audacity).
The second iteration of the VSDK (which was
used in this evaluation) included various bug-fixes,
and added several features such as service elements
that record user voice input, automatic configuration
of Asterisk and audio file conversion. This evaluation
has shown that it is possible for a local agent to de-
velop and change elements in a voice service on the
Kasadaka platform, achieving the goal of enabling lo-
cally owned and developed voice services.
During the session Adama has been instructed by
the authors in the usage of the VSDK’s development
interface. Together we walked through the process of
changing properties in the interface, adding new ele-
ments (such as new languages), recording and adding
new voice fragments to the system and various other
aspects. After this short training of about an hour,
we asked Adama to go through the process again
by himself, in order to verify that he was able to
now use the VSDK on his own to change the proper-
ties of the voice service. This went successfully and
Adama found the methodology and functionality of
the VSDK to be well set up, and was satisfied with
the way in which he was able to develop and maintain
voice services through the development interface.
During the evaluation, Adama has successfully
used the VSDK to apply and adapt the included voice
service interaction templates to the Foroba Blon use
case. Support for the Malian language Bambara (for
which no TTS and ASR exists) was added to the sys-
tem by recording voice fragments and adding them
Ney Yibeogo - Hello World: A Voice Service Development Platform to Bridge the Web’s Digital Divide
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