THE internet, wonderful though it is, reinforces one of life's fundamental divisions: that between the literate and the illiterate. Most websites, even those heavy with video content, rely on their users being able to read and—if interactive—write. Building your own site certainly does.

Guruduth Banavar, the director of IBM's India Research Laboratory, wanted to allow people who struggle with literacy to create websites. So he and his colleagues have devised a system based on what is known as “voice extensible markup language”, a cousin of the hypertext markup language used on conventional websites, that allows a website to be built and operated more or less by voice alone.

The “spoken web” Dr Banavar hopes to conjure into existence will be based on mobile phones, which are already proving an effective alternative to computers for obtaining information online in poor countries. As well as making voice calls, people can text one another and, if their phones are up to the job, get access to the web. Across the developing world there are a number of successful banking and money-transfer services that rely on mobile phones rather than computers.

Dr Banavar, however, thinks mobiles could be made to work much harder. His voice sites are hosted on standard computer servers and behave much like conventional websites. At their most basic they are designed for local use, acting as portals through which people can find out such things as when the mobile hospital will next visit their village, the price of rice in the local market and which wells they should use for irrigation. Instead of typing in a web address, the user rings the website up. Then, with a combination of voice commands and key presses, he navigates through a spoken list of topics and listens to subjects of interest.

That is useful, but not startlingly different from the sort of call-centre hell familiar to anyone who has tried to get information out of a large company by telephone. What makes Dr Banavar's approach different is that, by selecting an appropriate option with the handset, the user can add content to a voice site by recording a comment that is then made available to others. This can then be accessed as one of the “latest additions” or “most listened to” items in a spoken sub-menu. More important still, though, is that people can use a mobile phone to build their own voice sites—a process that, in trials conducted by the laboratory, even a non-expert could learn in as little as ten minutes.

The voice of the people

To build a site the user first selects a suitable template. The system then talks him through the bells and whistles he might wish to add to that template. A carpenter or autorickshaw driver, for example, can advertise his services, receive and confirm offers of work and even undertake basic commercial transactions through such a site. And the site can store offers of work when its owner is unavailable—as often happens in places where several people share a handset.

Like a more conventional website, a voice site has a mechanism by which information can be linked together and browsed, both backwards and forwards. The system IBM employs to achieve this, the hyperspeech transfer protocol (HSTP), is similar in principle to the hypertext transfer protocol that provides links from one conventional website to another. The HSTP allows, for instance, someone listening to an item on a voice site to hear another linked item and then return to the first one and continue listening from where he left off.

India, one of the world's fastest-growing mobile-phone markets, is an obvious place to try all this out. Although more than a third of its population of 1.2 billion now have a handset, they are often basic devices shared among families and friends. IBM is therefore carrying out trials of the spoken web in several parts of India—and, in collaboration with various other groups, in other countries.

Users will have to make calls, and those calls will cost money. But, Dr Banavar thinks, there are many ways of paying for them. Public-service sites such as local portals might be toll-free and subsidised by governments. Commercial sites could take a small percentage of any transaction carried out over them. Advertising might also provide revenue. It would, after all, be more difficult for the listener to screen out than the visual adverts seen on a conventional site.