IBM develops new protocol, users can talk to web

Giving a new dimension to the internet, the Indian research arm of the US-based IT giant IBM has developed a technology that will allow users to talk to the web and create voice sites using mobile phones.

"People will talk to the web and the web will respond. The research technology is analogous to the internet. Unlike personal computers it will work on mobile phones where people can simply create their voice sites," IBM India Research Laboratory Associate Director Manish Gupta told PTI.

For this technology, IBM has developed a new protocol -- Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP) -- which is similar to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

"India now has over 360 million cell phone subscribers. Last month we added 15 million," he said pointing out that the research technology targets ordinary mobile phone users, all of whom may not be literate.

The spoken web is a network of voice sites or interconnected voice and the response the company got in some pilot projects in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat and the kind of innovations that people came up with were just mind-boggling, Gupta said.