Empowering the largest knowledge workforce on Earth.
There are over 2 billion mobile phone subscribers in the developing world; a large fraction of these people are literate, yet earn less than 5 dollars/day. Our goal is to provide opportunities for this population to earn small amounts of supplemental income – money that could make a critical difference in their lives.
Our Accuracy Inference Engine enables us to differentially pay workers according to the value of their input. This not only makes the system more efficient, but lets us reward dedicated workers with higher-value work opportunities.
Examples
txteagle is intended to serve as a way to augment existing income and work opportunities for mobile phone subscribers in the developing world. Below are several real-world examples of individuals who have used the system to earn small amounts of money or airtime.
David, Maasai Herdsman, Kisumu, Kenya.
David has been unable to complete a formalized education. Like many of his Maasai peers, however, he owns a mobile phone. David completes voice-tasks helping Nokia train a speech recognition engine in his native Maasai dialect. Interacting with a txteagle Asterisk box, David repeats specific key words and phrases for recording. These sessions help David regularly earn enough airtime to last him a week.
Emmanuel, Recent high-school graduate (age 14), Mtwapa, Kenya.
Emmanuel recently finished secondary school, but has been unable to find regular employment. He has a lot of time and little money. Experimenting with txteagle transcription tasks, he found that he received fairly high accuracy scores, resulting in much needed income. He is now a regular contributor of such tasks.
Ruth & Betty, Home-Maker / Village Phone Operator, Butare, Rwanda.
Ruth is a mother of four and, while she reads and writes English fluently, she hasn’t been able to find much work in her village. She’d like to own a phone but hasn’t been able to save up the money. Betty operates a phone service in Ruth’s village. By ‘renting’ the phone to Ruth for about 50 cents per hour during off-peak times when Betty has no other customers, Ruth is able to complete simple transcription tasks.
This photo is of two security guards completing tasks in Nairobi for txteagle. Both finished 20 translation tasks in their native languages (Kikuyu and Luo).
Using the Village Phone to Reach More Workers
It is common for villages to have only one community phone that is shared by everyone. Villagers pay to use the phone when needed. With income levels typically quite low in these areas, the phones often go unused throughout most of the day. Together with the Grameen Foundation and MTN in Uganda and Rwanda, txteagle is working toward having the over 10,000 Village Phone Operators (VPOs) in these two countries offer txteagle services. In this way, the village phone can be used as a shared income generation tool during off-peak hours. Though there is only one phone in the village, the VPO will keep track of different users and compensate them based on their individual performance.