Development of multimodal user interfaces to Internet for common people

In recent years, there is a rapid advancement in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). However, the explosive growth of ICT and its many applications in education, health, agriculture etc. are confined to a limited number of privileged people, who live in digital pockets. We term these underprivileged people as common people, who are digitally illiterate as well as language illiterate. According to the UNESCO report, population of such people in the globe is 64% and in developing countries like in India, China etc. it is around 76%. It is therefore an urgent need to include this large set of population in the ICT revolution. This issue has been addressed in this paper and we propose to develop a solution in ICT for common people. We propose a multimodal interface mechanism to Internet so that common people can interact to Internet with their mother languages, speech and icons. The proposed approach has been tested with people in India and results are presented.