Audio Computers in Ghana

A small device that looks like a plastic retro watch is the Talking Books 'audio computer'. Their creation and distribution in Ghana is being carried out by the Literacy Bridge charity, whose goal is to help illiterate people in the poorest African countries. In this case, the word “poorest” is fully justified by the real conditions of the economy and society, since most 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 deprived of a screen and its main purpose is to play through the built-in speaker audio files for the storage of which a microSD card is intended. In addition to the entertainment function (there are songs, audiobooks, interviews on the map), you can listen to instructions on identifying and treating Ebola and cholera fever, breastfeeding babies, detecting plant diseases, creating organic fertilizers and other things that are extremely relevant for using an audio computer people who live far from civilization and doctors.

In fact, the word “audio computer” was not used accidentally: in the photo you can see buttons in the form of a game joystick designed to control the playback stream and some semblance of feedback - listeners can respond to some topic by writing a feedback and noting that, for example , “I don’t understand anything” or “I know how to solve this problem better than you” or even putting something like “like”. Playback speed can be controlled; “audio links” are provided - you can listen to the definition of an unfamiliar word. An added plus is that Talking Books knows a number of local languages ​​and dialects, so organization volunteers can exclude a language problem from consideration.



The creators of Talking Books took care of the exchange of information between devices in a timely manner. Since even a semblance of the Internet is not supposed, updating information on an audio computer can take place “right in the forest” - you can update files from a volunteer’s PC or Android device (they plan to carry out this procedure to update information about once every 5 weeks). On the other hand, nothing will stop smart Africans from exchanging files from their “talking books” via USB and themselves.



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

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