Latest News Updates on our work in Ghana and around the world.

by Cliff Schmidt

Hi Everyone! 

I’m excited to announce a major update to our Talking Book operating system (version 1.50) and our Audio Content Manager (beta 4). These updates coincide with the launch of our partnership with the (ECHOES program). These updates had two major goals: 1) improve usability for people with little or no formal education, and 2) provide our partners with features that improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their programs. These goals responded to feedback that we’ve received over the previous two years from communities and organizations, respectively.

I’ll give a brief overview of why this release is so important, but I’ll leave the details to a series of future posts that will be linked from this one as they are published.

If you’re not familiar with the Talking Book, you may want to visit our website summarizing the Talking Book and describing its features, such as the ability for users to:

 - find local language audio recordings by selecting a category like “health”, “agriculture”, “education”, “business”, or “stories”

 - record their own messages

 - send a digital copy of any message to another Talking Book (no need for a computer)

 - playback messages faster or slower, while keeping a normal pitch

 - use local language audio instructions to guide illiterate users through the Talking Book’s features

 - easily switch the audio instructions to a different language

 - learn from multiple-choice quizzes and audio hyperlinks to related messages

 - use the Talking Books in hot, humid, and dusty environments and not to worry about dropping it on hard surfaces.

Ease of Use

Since the first version of the Talking Book, children in even the most deprived communities have had no  problem operating it. Adults with a few years of formal education and those who live near cities with exposure to other technology also rarely have any trouble. But until this latest Talking Book version, women and men with no formal education living in remote communities required 45-60 minutes of training to become comfortable with the Talking Book’s basic operation.

With this new version 1.50, the device has become simpler to operate than ever. We did this by focusing on consistency, conversational instructions, and concealing complex operations. Non-essential features are now just a little less obvious so that the essential ones are more consistent. Read more about this change and several others.

Improving the Efficiency and Effectiveness of Our Partners’ Programs

Our partners, who are NGOs (nonprofits) and government agencies with expertise in local challenges related to health, agriculture, education, and business, have been telling us that they want feedback from the communities they serve. They want to know whether the expertise that they record on Talking Books is really making a difference. They want to know whether the solutions they propose are viewed as practical, and they want to be aware of what other needs a community has.

With this version of the Talking Book operating system and our Audio Content Manager, we provide partners an easy way to listen to recorded feedback from these communities and to view statistics on the relative popularity of their recordings.  They can find out whether listeners intend to apply what they have learned.

We also make it easy for anyone to translate the Talking Book’s operating system into any language they choose. This can be done in a few hours without needing a computer or anything more than a Talking Book.

Finally, we’ve worked hard on a lot of features that make practical steps in a Talking Book program much easier and faster. For instance, selecting a particular set of messages to copy to each of many Talking Books scattered throughout a community is now easier than ever. It was always possible and easy for our staff; but we have observed how our partners will need to do this and have adapted the device accordingly.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 20th, 2011 at 11:48 pm and is filed under Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.