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Viral Phone Game Helps Illiterate Pakistanis Find Job Listings

[Philip Lelyveld comment: This is a BRILLIANT use of technology for social good. Use a silly telephone game to teach an illiterate population how to use customer service commands (press # for...), and then give them audio job listings which they can search using the same commands.]

In Pakistan, researchers are using a silly voice game to motivate hundreds of thousands of people to master an automated voice system—and then move on to scroll job listings this way, too.

The effort, led by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Pakistan’s Lahore University of Management Sciences, started last May, when just five people in service jobs at Lahore University were given a phone number to get started playing the game. As of this week, the game has more than 156,000 users involving nearly 600,000 calls, including 27,000 inquiries to a job service, all of it sustained by viral spreading alone.

In the game, called Polly, a person calls the game’s phone number and the system calls right back, gives commands to record a message to a friend, plays it back with funny effects added, and allows the person to forward the goofy version to a friend, all in the native Urdu language.

Doing this means following voice and key commands: you are instructed to say something, after which you must press #.  After hearing the funny effect, you press 1 to hear it again, 2 to send it to a friend, 3 to try another effect; to send the funny message to your friend, you must enter the friend’s phone number and press #.

Thus, the user has just been trained in the basics of using a customer service line or other automated voice system.  And after hooking users, the researchers scanned Pakistani newspapers for jobs appropriate to low-skilled, low-literate workers, recorded them in Urdu, and made them available for audio-browsing. In just four months, users forwarded listings to friends 22,000 times.

See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512156/viral-phone-game-helps-illiterate-pakistanis-find-job-listings/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130313