Voice enabled G2C applications for m-government using open source software

Abstract

M-government is the extension of e-government to mobile platforms. The advancements in mobile communication technology enable a natural transition from the era of e-government to the era of m-government by extending the internet from wired PCs to mobile phones. Since speech is the most natural means of communication, by linking a mobile phone to a VoiceXML gateway we are able to build voice enabled Government-to-Citizen (G2C) applications which are accessible ubiquitously by anyone, anytime. Our implementation of the voice gateway successfully integrates the mobile telephone network with automatic speech recognition, text to speech synthesis for English and Hindi, and web navigation systems based on open standards and using open source software. We describe three voice enabled m-governance G2C applications on the open source Android platform. The platform specific m-governance applications can be downloaded directly on a mobile phone through mobile browsers for their use by citizens. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.