AudioAutoQ: An open source initiative for producing audio-guided mobile phones

questionnaires in local language in order to overcome the obstacle of illiteracy in selfadministered surveys.
Issoufou Seidou Sanda
Initially published in the African Statistical Newsletter December 2014
(http://ecastats.uneca.org/acsweb/portals/0/ASN/ASN1412.pdf)

The people in my village are illiterate: when you say three plus four, they dont understand what you
are talking about. But as soon as you put it in terms of money, you discover that they are excellent in
calculation A participant in the Joint StatCom-CoDG meeting in Tunis December 2014.

Mobile technologies open a full range of new opportunities for data collection in developing countries.
With a mobile penetration rate of up to 75% in Africa, they can be solution for collecting and
transmitting data from areas that are otherwise difficult to access. The system proposed here takes
advantage of the sound and voice capabilities of smart devices to develop an audio questionnaire in the
local language of the respondent that she/he can fill alone by following only the audio and visual
instructions.
The AudioAutoQ system takes advantage of the following:
- Even illiterate individuals can easily follow audio instructions in their mother tongue to fill a
questionnaire.
- Even those who have not been to school are very likely to know how count and manipulate money in
the local currency.

In order to make it easy to fill the questionnaire by anyone, AudioAutoQ follows the following
principles:
- All questions are asked in local
language and the answer is
systematically a choice among a
limited number of pre-defined
options.
- The respondent always
navigates through the options by
using the right and left arrow and
select an option using the center
button of a directional pad.
Options are said in audio, as well
as the questions about the
confirmation of the selection of
an option. For devices that
support images, additional visual
cues are given on the screen
(examples: figures 1 and 2).

- All operations of the questionnaire, including interrupting and saving, can be done using the five
buttons of the directional pad. Therefore, the respondent doesnt have to understand the letters and
numbers on a keyboard to answer the questions.
- All numbers are represented as amounts in local currency, with accompanying images of local bills
and coins for devices that can display images.
Using these principles
and well designed
sequences of questions,
both quantitative and
qualitative
questions
can be answered easily
with low risk of errors
even
by
illiterate
people. The image
below shows part of a
sequence o questions
for getting the price of
product.
The advantages of such
system are numerous.
In addition to the fact
that it can help dealing
with the obstacle of
illiteracy,
if
the
application is installed
on the mobile phone of
the respondent, there is
no
need
for
an
enumerator to move
physically to administer
the questionnaire. This
is
particularly
interesting for surveys
such as consumer price
surveys,
or
panel
surveys were data have
to be entered repeatedly
from the same person at
a given frequency and
for some period of
time. For price surveys
for
example,
the
application can be installed on the phone of a vendor that will then fill it every day with the market
prices of some items on this day and transfer the data directly via SMS or internet to a central
processing unit, allowing computing real-time price indices. The application can take advantage of the
capacities of the mobile device to remind the respondent through a ringtone when it is time to fill the
questionnaire. It will even be possible to use a bonus-malus system depending on whether the
respondent has filled the questionnaire or not. For example, if the phone was offered to the respondent,
the application can lock its use or deactivate some functionalities of the device until the questionnaire
is answered. The questionnaire can also do immediate consistency check of the data entered and
encrypt them before sending if necessary.
3

The objective of the open source project is to provide the tools for easily developing and deploying
such questionnaires on various mobile devices by:
Providing html5/javascipt temples for the mobile questionnaire that can be deployed to a
variety of mobile devices using frameworks such as Phonegap .
Providing tools that allow quickly designing a questionnaire and attaching the audios and
images files. A typical sequence of developing such questionnaire is given in graph x
-

Providing images and sounds files for free use in the questionnaires.

Providing codes that allows taking advantage of the voice synthesis capacity of mobile devices
in case pre-recorded audio files are not available.
All the tools are developed as open source to allow the statistical community to contribute and to allow
the use of the tools at no cost for national statistical offices. The page of the open source project is:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/audioautoq. The project is still in its infancy and files will be made
available progressively.