OpenG 'Superphone' — A Voice-First Smartphone Operating System for Illiterate Users in Côte d'Ivoire

Cerco, an Ivorian technology and education group founded by Alain Capo-Chichi, developed 'Kone', a voice-driven operating system that responds to spoken commands in Baoulé, Bété, Dioula and 14 other languages spoken in Côte d'Ivoire, plus around 50 further African languages, so that people who cannot read text-based menus can still use a smartphone for everyday and government-facing tasks such as checking a bank balance or having an official document read aloud.
Launched commercially in July 2022 as the 'OpenG' or 'Superphone' handset, the product is manufactured at the ICT and Biotechnology Village in Grand-Bassam under a government partnership — Cerco pays no import taxes or customs duties in the free-trade zone in exchange for training roughly 1,200 young people a year and remitting a share of income to the state — and is distributed nationally through 200 Orange telecom shops, with plans to expand into more than a dozen additional African countries.
Multiple independent outlets (Africanews, VOA, News24 and TechXplore, among others) reported that Cerco had received 200,000 phone orders as of September 2022, shortly after launch; these are pre-order and sales figures rather than a measured usability or outcomes evaluation, and no independent study of how illiterate users actually use the device day-to-day, or of task-completion and error rates, was found — a gap worth flagging given the strength of the underlying design concept.

Read the full analysis: https://techxplore.com/news/2022-09-voice-operated-smartphones-africa-illiterate.html