Gurgaon idol: a singing competition over community radio and IVRS

Abstract

In this paper, we describe several IVR usage and learnability insights that emerged from a singing competition held by a community radio station located in an urban community of low-income migrant workers. Our community radio station partner, Gurgaon Ki Awaaz, relies heavily on folk songs to build its content repository and develop a close rapport with its community; the station organized a competition called Gurgaon Idol, in which community members could call into an IVR system to record their songs, and vote to select the best songs. Our research yielded several insightful results on how to best solicit audio recordings on IVR, methods for crowdsourced voting on IVR, cultural preferences towards certain voting methods, how to help first-time IVR users learn the system, and practical tips to keep in mind when running such a competition. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore usability of voice user interfaces for recording audio and for crowdsourced voting over IVR systems.