Advanced vocal web browser

Nowadays, more than 2 billion people around the world have access to the Internet regularly, and the Internet is the most important platform for information, work and entertainment with more than 150 million active websites. However, these websites are accessible only through devices equipped with a screen and a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Furthermore, these devices need a network connection to access the internet. With the development of a Vocal User Interface (VUI), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and VoIP communication, we present in this article a system which allows browsing the Internet by using a standard phone only. The system works like an intelligent call routing mechanism that accepts vocal commands as input from the user, translates those commands into HTTP requests, sends them to the web server which processes it and finally returns the HTTP response translated back to the user in a vocally manner. To reach this goal the system implements Content Extraction (CE) algorithms over web content in order to analyze, classify and return relevant parts of web pages to the user. We conducted a series of experiments to evaluate the performance of the system. Our results show that the system offers a reliable and efficient web browsing experience in more than 80% of the websites tested. Its applications are numerous: for example helping the blind access the internet through speech and hearing, helping disabled people or young children unable to use a keyboard to “speak” their commands into the web, or, simply enabling any person to interface the web contents via oral commands, instead of a keyboard.