"Audio Computers" in Ghana

A small device that looks like a plastic retro-watch is the “audio computer” Talking Books. They are created and distributed in Ghana by the charity Literacy Bridge, whose goal is to help illiterate people in the poorest African countries. In this case, the word “poorest” is fully justified by the actual conditions of the economy and society, since the majority of the target audience earns about one and a half dollars a day, is deprived of access to electricity and has never learned to read or write.

Talking Books is devoid of the screen and its main purpose is to play through the built-in speaker audio files that MicroSD card is designed to store. In addition to the entertainment function (there are recordings of songs, audio books, interviews on the card), with the help of an audio computer, you can listen to instructions for identifying and treating Ebola and cholera, breastfeeding babies, detecting diseases in crops, creating organic fertilizers and other things that are highly relevant to people who live far from civilization and doctors.

In fact, the word “audio computer” was not accidentally used: on the photo you can see buttons in the form of a game joystick, designed to control the playback flow and some similarity of feedback - listeners can respond to some topic by writing “feedback” and noting that, for example , “Nothing is clear” or “I know how to solve this problem better than you” or even by putting something like “like”. Playback speed can be controlled; "audio links" are provided - you can listen to the definition of an unfamiliar word. An additional advantage is that Talking Books knows a number of local languages ​​and dialects, so organization volunteers can exclude a language problem from consideration.
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The creators of Talking Books took care of the exchange of information between devices in an expeditious manner. Since even the Internet is not supposed to be similar, updating information on an audio computer can occur “right in the forest” - you can update files from a PC or an Android volunteer device (this procedure is planned to be updated approximately once every 5 weeks to update the information). On the other hand, nothing will prevent clever Africans from exchanging files from their “toking-books” via USB and themselves.



The lack of electricity and the autonomy of the device is solved by using the usual and very affordable in Ghana zinc-carbon replaceable batteries, which are available for purchase, and provide approximately 15 hours of work for the audio computer.

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