About
The digital divide remains a huge global issue: only 38% of the world population use the Internet (source: International Telecommunications Union). This is due to literacy, digital literacy, access to devices, and access to internet connection. Current efforts rely on new infrastructure and delivering devices and literacy. Thus, they are hindered by steep adoption curves. In contrast, the amount of people that have access globally to voice telephony is staggering: 29% for fixed and 96% for mobile. Recent advances in cloud telephony and speech recognition, open the possibility of delivering Internet access to billions around the world, using resources that a great majority already enjoys: a telephone and their voice! This is what Verbal aims to achieve: to deliver internet services and content, through voice telephony, to potentially millions of users in many countries.