Building a Natural Language Hindi Speech Interface to Access Market Information

It is a well known fact that majority of rural India earns its livelihood from agriculture and farming. Although India is a net exporter of various agricultural products, the farmer who happens to be the primary producer, has remained information poor which puts him at a disadvantage. With little or no knowledge of prices at the markets, farmers have no leverage to negotiate better prices for their produce. Speech based solution can address this issue of market price information availability to farmers. Speech based solutions are increasingly being used for transaction but they are both (a) restricted to menu based type interactions where a series of interactions are required for the transaction to take place and (b) primarily built for the English literate population synonymously urban population. Paradoxically, the benefit of a speech based solution is best reaped by the rural folks speaking their native language (very often non-English) because the other modes of transactions are either not readily available to them or if available difficult to use. In this paper, we develop a natural language Hindi speech interface to enable Hindi speaking population access market prices of commodities.