Author: Pakhi Bagai, Head of Marketing
Who is the local language user?
I am. And so are you. And so is everybody you converse with.
It was 2012, and I was eagerly looking forward to my Singapore trip. There was a tiny hitch though: my passport renewal.
So, I went down to the Regional Passport Office at Lalbagh in Bangalore. The overworked officer at the counter gave me a list of documents required for my passport application under the tatkal scheme. One of them was a residential certificate from the local panchayat.
My next stop was up a narrow flight of stairs of the local panchayat administrative building. Ninety minutes and a hundred bucks later, I was handed a pink slip filled out in Kannada—a language I wasn’t familiar with. I couldn’t read my name, address or anything written on the slip.
I remember standing outside the office, feeling a little drained from waiting in line for the paper written in a script I couldn’t decipher.
In the chappals of a local-language user
I was beginning to feel annoyed with the whole situation. I asked around to see if someone could help me verify the details in Kannada by translating them in Hindi or English for me. I found no one. If the details were misspelled, there was a high chance that I could miss my already planned Singapore trip.
While I did manage to get my new passport, I still distinctly remember the feeling of helplessness that washed over me when I held that pink paper. I’ve stayed in six states of India and always made myself at home wherever I was. I’ve gotten by with using link languages and always pick up a few words here and there. I have revelled in different cultural nuances and eased myself into local cultures effortlessly.
However, when I saw my own personal details in a language I didn’t understand, it left me flummoxed.
Was this how non-English speakers in India felt when they were forced to encounter indecipherable Roman scripts everywhere around them? I wondered.
Varying levels of user maturity
Four years later, I would end up at Reverie Language Technologies, an organisation that focuses on the making web and mobile content available to local-language users, such as me and you, so that we can avail services and information in our own language.
To my delight, I found that Reverie also offers a free multilingual keypad app called Swalekh with language support for 20 Indian languages.
Shortly before joining, I was trying to explain to my mother about Reverie. When I introduced her to Swalekh, she immediately took to the idea. She used to email me regularly but now WhatsApps me. So, I asked her to download Swalekh because it offers easy and accurate input while disallowing ambiguous characters. However, she did not know where to download it from. The words “Google Playstore” seemed foreign to her.
I then realized that the perspective and the user maturity level of someone who is new to smartphones are not same as those for somehow who is smartphone-savvy.
Accurate multilingual technology and solutions, device compatibility, and relevant user experience are the three key drivers for addressing this local-language market needs.
Words like “apps” and “browsers” are alien to local-language users and leaves them feeling handicapped.
For example, the “Downloads” app that comes built-in with my phone might confuse a naïve user. Ideally, its use is to store any files downloaded on my phone. However, when a local-language user is advised to download an app—and the word “download” has no substitute in most Indian local-languages—would they go to the Downloads app or the PlayStore/AppStore apps?
This prompted me to delve into finer details about how we can solve a typical local-language user’s requirements. Starting with basic segmentation of local language users—urban and rural—would give us insights into their usage patterns, needs, and what they think the Internet is and what it should be.
The promise of the local-language user market
As per IAMAI projections in 2015, only 35% of Indians (462 million) were to have access to the Internet in 2016. And, only 87 million in rural India are estimated to have access to mobile internet, compared with 219 million in urban centres.
According to Boston Consulting Group’s July 2016 paper, “The Rising Connected Consumer in Rural India,” the number of rural connected users is expected to increase from 120 million in 2015 to 315 million by 2020. The same paper states that 25% ecommerce of all rural consumers find ecommerce sites and apps hard to use.
Understanding local language users begs a lot of questions. I decided to profile local-language Internet users every now and then, and ask them about:
Their background.
Whether they use a feature phone or smartphone.
Their monthly expenditure on mobile recharges/data packs.
Their knowledge and usage of social media apps. If they do use these apps, what do they use them for and how.
What they think the Internet is.
What would best serve their needs—a better device, an app-less interface or some derivative of that.
Some sample profiles
The post Who is the local language user? appeared first on Reverie Language Technologies.