SPEECH-BASED ACCESS OF AGRICULTURAL COMMODITY PRICES IN BANGLA

The system is a speech-based interface in native language to automate the information access by semi-literate or illiterate farmers (target users) of rural India and empower them to earn a better livelihood. The core of the application is a real-time, multiple pronunciation connected word Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system that recognizes spoken district, commodity and mandi (market) names in native language over telephone channel. Based on this recognized district-commodity criteria, searching is done within a predesigned price database (crawled from AGMARKNET website, http://www.agmarknet.nic.in/ managed by Ministry of Agriculture, Govt. of India) to get the market wise latest modal price which is then played back to the end user. The users just need to dial a specific telephone number and speak into the system in native language (only district name and commodity name) to place the request and know its price.

Use Cases

• Weather forecasting
• Voice enabled Railway travel enquiry system
• Health informatics
• Tourist guide 

Salient Features

• Remote access via mobile or landline phone, no need of computers and internet
• Easy to use: support Voice query and response, no need to type or touch
• 24 x 7 hrs Automated Service, no more waiting for reply from manual operators
• Mother tongue support, Bi-lingual (Bangla & English) prompts for better usability
• Helpful for illiterate and visually impaired farmers