14 ms·

Tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India

264 points by NDAjam 4y ago

flerchin 4y ago
Literacy rates in India look to be ~80% and climbing about 1% per year. Obviously it'll reach an asymptote, but it's looking like India already surpasses the US in this regard. Of course, given the large population, more Indians are illiterate than there are people in almost every nation. Nonetheless, wouldn't this solution be quite niche? Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/literacy-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/literacy-rat...
- swamp40 4y ago
  There is more going on here than literacy. Even if you are illiterate, if you tell someone to pay 10 rupees you could see if 10 rupees made it to your account. Do those vendors not have smartphones? That's what I am suspecting. If they did, an app could announce it and you wouldn't need the external speaker. The speakers seem to be directly connected to the cellular network. And rented for ridiculously small fees.
  - alsodumb 4y ago
    Now that I think about it, I am not sure why they didn't just announce using the smartphone speaker - I've seen several vendors with smartphones still using these boxes. Granted, many vendors don't have smart phones, and perhaps sound boxes started with them. I think the fintech companies saw the opportunity and decided to not implement it their app for users with smartphone. Given that they are so cheap, I guess the vendors even with smart phones decided to get them anyway.
    - z3t4 4y ago
      It's difficult to wake up a phone to play custom audio. I believe iOS and Android has made that impossible without rooting the device.
      - wildzzz 4y ago
        You don't need to play custom audio. Notification narration already exists.
  - vaidhy 4y ago
    Yes, the vendors have smartphones. The smartphones' speakers are not loud enough to announce over the road noise and general buzz in Indian shops. It would also be too distracting to keep looking down on the phone.
- alsodumb 4y ago
  I've interacted with several vendors who use these sound boxes. The article is a bit misleading in the sense that illiteracy is not the primary driver of the usage of these devices. It is a better check-out experience. Vendors were busy and annoyed by the fact that they have to use their phone to confirm payments which often hindered them from doing their routine to sell more stuff. Think about vendors making street foods, actively selling vegetables, etc. Now all they have to do is listen to the confirmation, directly streamed from the payment gateway vendor's server as soon as receive the money. Minor convenience, agreed, but the service isn't expensive to run (thanks to the minimal hardware it needs and the low data prices in India) and surprisingly even small vendors are okay with paying a subscription fee for it.
  - db1234 4y ago
    +1. First time I came across these speakers was when I had tea in a road side tea stall off an highway. The shop was crowded and I held my phone at the owner to show him the evidence of payment which he ignored and within a couple of seconds my payment was announced on the speaker. Great experience!
  - ajonit 4y ago
    Fraud was another reason for the emergence of these sound boxes. Android store was filled with fake payment screenshot generator apps. People would show the (fake) payment screenshot and leave the shop premises (saying “must be a network problem at your end.”) After multiple complaints from merchants, Paytm and the likes innovated this affordable idea.
  - achow 4y ago
    Yes right. > The 48-year-old, who can neither read nor write, would need to call his son to confirm that the payment had been received. Looks like the author made up a narrative. These vendors definitely can read numbers, they manage loads of cash through the day. They do lightening fast calculation in their head - which would put a Math grad student to shame. They may not be able to read, write English (or other languages) but they are very comfortable with numbers and operations on them (addition, subtractions...). And they would not need "their son" to confirm the amount (they can read), and also they would recognize a very large green checkmark (an icon to confirm successful transaction), so don't need "their son" for that too.
- t8sr 4y ago
  I thought you were joking about India surpassing the US in literacy rates, and then I looked it up. It's 75 - 85% depending on how you count. What?! How is this number not 99.9%? Developed countries are at 100% or minus rounding error. Even Canada is at 99%, and that's next door. What is going on in the US?
  - eru 4y ago
    I would suggest you double check what definition of literacy the different countries are using. Perhaps the US has a more stringent definition? As an example, for a long time Germany used a way to measure unemployment that yielded consistently higher numbers than most of the rest of the world. So any honest international comparison had to make adjustments. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States > In many nations, the ability to read a simple sentence suffices as literacy, and was the previous standard for the U.S. The definition of literacy has changed greatly; the term is presently defined as the ability to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential.[3]
    - bombcar 4y ago
      You also need to see if it’s from official reports based on testing or statistical reports based on surveys. Many people who are counted literate are functionally illiterate- they car recognize street signs, their name, etc but not much more.
  - sriram_malhar 4y ago
    It is not a fair comparison. In India, the definition of "literacy" does not mean functional literacy in India ... merely knowledge of the alphabet is enough to qualify ("akshar gyan").
  - nativespecies 4y ago
    Public education has been gutted for decades in this country.
- sowbug 4y ago
  But it's good that there are options. Many of us aged 40+ can't read HN-sized text anymore, and the prevalence of presbyopia among UI designers is evidently 0%. Throw in glare from sunlight, a busy storefront where you constantly need your hands and eyes elsewhere, etc.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > it's looking like India already surpasses the US in this regard Different standards. India is measuring base literacy, being able to "read and write with understanding a short simple statement about their everyday life" [1]. The comparable counter-statistic in the U.S. is Level 1 illiteracy, or being able to "unable to successfully determine the meaning of sentences, read relatively short texts to locate a single piece of information, or complete simple forms" in English [2]. That figure is 4.1%. (A Spanish-speaking physics PhD would count.) [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/literacy-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/literacy-rat... [2] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf
  - Y_Y 4y ago
    You think you can get a PhD in physics without learning to read basic English? Not this century.
- CyberDildonics 4y ago
  > Obviously it'll reach an asymptote I think you mean the increase will level off. An "asymptote" would mean it is always getting closer to some target number, and there is no reason that would be 'obviously' true.
  - flerchin 4y ago
    "Obviously, it'll asymptotically approach an upper bound and level off." I do think my meaning was clear, but yes you're correct.
- aatharuv 4y ago
  Africa is possibly another target. Its literacy rates are a little bit under India's, and it's another place where digital payments have gone big, even earlier than India. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SSF/sub-saharan-africa-/literacy-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SSF/sub-saharan-africa...
- dirtyid 4y ago
  20% (~300M) illiterate skews old, higher % of whom are active in workforce and will be for decades. Not that ~300M is "niche" as you said, but think of it technology that helps 50% of the workforce vs 20% of population.
sfifs 4y ago
I visited India a few times in the last 9 months after digital payments had taken off due to COVID and can attest that these have been game changers that have led shopkeeps to accept e-payments. More than anything to do with literacy, this basically allows Shopkeeper to keep doing what they are doing without fiddling with their phones etc to confirm they received money. The device just says the amount received out loud and at that point, the customer can leave with the goods. Haven't seen this tech anywhere else. In my latest trip, I don't believe I paid cash in any shop and I was in a second tier city the whole time, not one of the big metropolitan cities.
- alsodumb 4y ago
  Just to add to this, digital payments in India got popular well before COVID, significantly increasing after the demonetization charade (which imo was a bad decision and total chaos).
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    The increase due to demonetization cancelled out afterwards. The grown we see now came organically, later
  - yashg 4y ago
    Demonetization induced usage reduced once cash was back in circulation. It was COVID era fear of touching cash and compulsion of lockdowns that really made digital payments hit the stratosphere.
    - asdted 4y ago
      Pre COVID transcations per month stood at 1.5b and now at 8.5B. COVID might have convinced few people that's all. Demonetization's effect is not clear since UPI came out just a year before Demonetization took place. It took off because of young generation and costs nothing as simple as that. They forced businesses and other to embrace it. Fun fact, i have been using UPI ever since it came out and used to pay for coconut/veggies with it even back in 2017
rkrishnaan 4y ago
Another thing that helps this boom is, in India no one has any problem in sharing their phone number with strangers. Delivery workers, Cab drivers, Restaurant waitlist, you name it. So payment send and receive with just mobile number as the primary key becomes easier.
- villgax 4y ago
  Wow not true at all, everybody hesitates to bring forced to give mobile number at the supermarket it cloth stores for no good reason than to feed into FB/Google in bulk. For paying a bill you're just scanning the QR most of the time, it's only P2P like cabs/autos when you may have to scan the drivers personal QR. Gpay & others apart from BHIM tend to already generate or allow alphanumeric UPI ID.
- eru 4y ago
  That seems to be working in Singapore as well.
- hipratham 4y ago
  There is also Virtual Payment Address (VPA) attached to account wiht legit number and bank acct which is good enough to use (share /scan QR code ) with merchant/user name.
- Freedom2 4y ago
  This is one of the most unique things about India that I haven't seen in any other country - the openness and community between its citizens. Especially proud to be Indian!
villgax 4y ago
They do charge a subscription fee for it, but sadly enough this could have been done with any speaker they had & using the official app as well
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  But could it have been done with the resilience/volume/sound quality/redundancy/etc of the speaker? A situation that comes to mind is a vendor stepping away to go to the bathroom, and asking their neighboring vendor to sell while they are gone. A cheap enough, but fail proof and versatile solution is not necessarily a waste.
  - jhatax 4y ago
    At less than a USD a month--currency vs. cost of living conversion--this subscription is extremely cheap considering the many positives: confirmation of payment from a new revenue stream, multiple language support, low-ish latency, fraud prevention for the seller. While a lot of Indians have smartphones, this speaker is the ideal example of a device that solves one specific problem and nothing else.
- blntechie 4y ago
  It's 200 Rs/mo as per a shopkeeper I talked to. It's pretty affordable for many shops as it cuts down on fraud a bit and they see utility in it.
- pimlottc 4y ago
  That would require leaving a smartphone and a speaker lying around where they might be stolen. Having it be a cheap, single-use device reduces the incentive for theft.
  - kwhitefoot 4y ago
    You can buy a smartphone good enough for the job for less than 60 GBP even in the UK, I'm sure they can be had for considerably less in India. And it doesn't need to be lying around, the user can have it on them.
ck2 4y ago
Is it a crazy suggestion that you could put a display on the smart speaker and teach a small subset of literacy for them to see what is being said? Could someone learn a small amount that way? I've seen countless stories of people who come to the US and learn some english by watching TV with the close captions turned on, has to work elsewhere?
- IronWolve 4y ago
  More likely the audible confirmation allows everyone to know you paid, and the shopkeeper doesnt have to keep his eyes on a device all day. Easier for everyone.
- alsodumb 4y ago
  As discussed in other comments, illiteracy is not the primary driver of these devices. To some extent it is, but not a significant chunk. It’ll probably also make the device more expensive.
- HeavyFeather 4y ago
  What's cheaper to program and produce: a speaker or a display and chip? I think that this device is super smart. It's a "cell phone" chip that "reads" the texts out loud when received from a hardcoded number. It could cost a few dollars. The only cheaper thing would be upcycling existing smartphones, but that would be a support nightmare.
jjoonathan 4y ago
It's amazing how fintech can create actual value when they aren't all just fighting over who gets to salami slice a nation's commerce! > Digital payments have taken off in a big way in India in recent years due to the government’s unified payments interface (UPI)... But this boom hasn’t helped fintech companies in India as they do not make money from facilitating UPI transactions.
- alsodumb 4y ago
  There was definitely massive digital payments drive before the speakers, and the article is exaggerating it’s effects. However, there was a good chunk of vendors who were not happy with the ‘check your phone every time you get a payment’ routine and this solution works out for them perfectly.
- raihansaputra 4y ago
  Same is happening in Indonesia. The central bank standardized a QR code format for ~all digital payments and people can do cross-platform payments. Makes stuff so much easier.
ryzvonusef 4y ago
video of it in action (english subtitles) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUR84Qz0KbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUR84Qz0KbM
- ape4 4y ago
  So the merchant has to buy/rent a device. I expected it to be phone-to-phone for such wide acceptance.
  - lazyninja987 4y ago
    [dead]
  - ryzvonusef 4y ago
    from my research, here is what I've found: 1- The govt insists the payments be done on their national backbone, which works on 0 markup, so companies have to find different avenues for revenue 2- The device is essentially a mobile phone with no display(newest version has a small pocket-calculator sized lcd, but most do not) and just four buttons: power, volume up, volume down, and repeat last message. It takes a SIM and has a rechargeable battery and a loud speaker. 3- This means essentially operators a renting a very specialised "dumb-phone"; one which has a simple audio output but no input (and thus access) to the actual app. They can leave this "phone" out in the public, while keeping their smartphone separate and secluded. 4- The device rent is lowered or even waived if you have a high-enough transaction volume. So for people who have a low usage, they can stick with checking their phone; for people with more frequent usage, it pays for it self. ---- I see a lot of benefits for this. AFAIK, each device is keyed to the user, so stealing it not beneficial, but even if some one did, no can use it to access the app or your funds, since all it does is receive confirmation SMS. There no training involved, and more importantly, no handover of a device anytime you to step away from a counter; anyone can take over and just listen to the confirmation message. one benefit the article mentioned is that people would dupe the seller by showing fake screenshots of a transaction, how that was eliminated by the device; no sound message, no payment. But the best benefit is the multi-tasking; you can use your hands and eyes to keep focused on the task at hand while using your ears to keep track of payments. Imagine a food-stall seller having to wipe their grease/sauce covered hands and fiddle with a slippery phone, anytime a customer paid, it would never work.
asdted 4y ago
Digital payment transactions stand at 8.5B per month. It's just mind-blowing
evan_ 4y ago
They talk about how sometimes people would show them doctored receipts to scam them- how much longer before people start recording the "Paid Rs 50" voice and playing it back off their phones? Not sure what the fix for that would be- reading off the time/date, a small integrated display, or maybe it's just not an issue.
- jatins 4y ago
  This speaker is with the merchant. I am sure the merchant can distinguish between a sound coming from their speaker vs sound coming from someone's mobile.
jack_riminton 4y ago
The vendor being able to instantly take out a loan is the real kicker here. If even a relatively small percentage of shopkeepers do this it will enable economic growth only seen in places like China in the 1990s, the effect will be multiplicative throughout the economy
- WeylandYutani 4y ago
  Only if they can pay back the loan otherwise you just end up with a banking crisis.
  - jack_riminton 4y ago
    True but this isn’t inflation of assets it’s money for goods purchases by the sounds of it which is a lot less susceptible to bubbles
- kridsdale1 4y ago
  I was so happy to read that part. A triumph of capitalism, if it takes off. Everyone deserves the right to a fair and quick evaluation of their default risk to get access to capital on margin. It’s the best way to get people to invest in themselves and their communities.
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
I remember seeing these at vegetable stands and thinking it was a goofy shopkeeper quirk, didn't realize how useful of a feature this was to shopkeepers. Kudos to PayTM for a very good solution to speeding up digital payments across society
penguin_booze 4y ago
PhonePe translates to "on the phone" in Hindi. And, of course, it reads like "phone pay" in English. A nice touch.
throwaway280382 4y ago
Not mentioned in the article but I asked a shopkeeper why they use it. Answer is fraud. Earlier, customers would download a "fake" app, which miciked online gateway's UI. Customer would punch in money, and show to shopkeeper that "payment went through". Customer takes goods with them and leaves. Shopkeeper looses money. With this sound box, shopkeeper gives goods ONLY after the box makes sound. Now imagine if a elderly or illiterate relative of shopowner is manning the shop. They may not know how to operate their "banking" app to make sure money has reached. The sound box removes that problem.
- kylehotchkiss 4y ago
  "Fraud" is too friendly a word for this. It's just theft from a person who probably is having a much harder time making ends meet than the person stealing. Theft is never a pleasant topic but stealing from somebody with much less financial means than you is morally bankrupt.
- rexf 4y ago
  It's mentioned. > Balwant Singh, 32, runs a grocery store in New Delhi with his mother. He bought a Paytm Soundbox in 2020 after realizing digital payment receipts could be doctored. “[Before sound boxes], people were using apps to create fake payment receipts. I got conned a few times,” he told Rest of World. The soundbox does seem useful. What you mentioned is all in the article. > Abbas Ali, a vegetable vendor in an upscale neighborhood in New Delhi, started accepting digital payments in 2021. But every time a customer paid online, the 48-year-old, who can neither read nor write, would need to call his son to confirm that the payment had been received.
kwhitefoot 4y ago
Sounds very much like the Vipps system we have in Scandinavia, particularly Norway, with the addition of something like the Android Voice Notify app which reads Android notification. My mobile phone has been doing this for years. Whenever I receive a payment it reads it out to me. No need for any new devices.
AniseAbyss 4y ago
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bobse 4y ago
Sounds like globalists want to enslave India as well.
TheHappyOddish 4y ago
Am I crazy here? If you're buying a device, why not buy an EFTPOS (credit card/touch pay) machine that facilitates the transaction? Is Google/Apple Pay not prevelant in India? Given they're paying by their phone, surely it is? I feel like I'm missing something here, this method seems more complex than the now standard "tap your phone on the machine" in my country. The banks give them out for free or a small fee (they take a fee per transaction) or the vendors use a third party like Square.
- pwn0 4y ago
  The tap & pay model is an extension of payment using credit cards which has been the preferred payment method in the west for decades. On the other hand, credit cards never caught on in India, specially among the middle and lower middle class folks which is a large chunk of the population. So while the west underwent evolution from paper currency to credit cards to digital payments, India skipped the credit card generation and went straight for digital payments thanks to cheap android phones and free/subsidized/cheap 3G/4G data costs.
- tpreetham 4y ago
  The reason could because of how these payments apps evolved. People already had cheap android phones in their hand. After the 4g boom, many got their first smartphone. UPI related playment apps started with QR code scanning, just like in China. There is no extra cost to the vendor. All they need is a sticker with their QR, which customers can scan. Later, they came up with a (bluetooth) speaker which can announce payments. It doesn't even need a connected smartphone. If they used cards, they need to manufacture it and the readers. Ship them to their home addresses (which is complicated and lossy), train them about card usage. For many vendors who accepted UPI payments, it was their first time accepting something other than cash as payments.
tony_antony 4y ago
> Six months after subscribing, Singh received an instant loan of 3 lakh rupees (around $3,600) from Paytm. He used the money to add more products to his store. “I had never thought of taking up a loan since it involves lots of paperwork and could take months to get processed. Here, I got it instantly so I took it up,” he said. After he paid it off, Singh took another loan from Paytm for 5 lakh rupees (around $6,000). This a brilliant strategy for generating proof of financial transactions and thus making small businesses eligible for credit.
creatonez 4y ago
Why is it taking 10 minutes to confirm payment...? Edit: For some reason it's mentioned nowhere in the article, but it's because these are cryptocurrency transactions
- s_dev 4y ago
  Another user is claiming: >Not mentioned in the article but I asked a shopkeeper why they use it. Answer is fraud. Earlier, customers would download a "fake" app, which miciked online gateway's UI. Customer would punch in money, and show to shopkeeper that "payment went through". Customer takes goods with them and leaves. Shopkeeper looses money. I don't think half of India is using crypto currency transactions everyday. So this explanation makes more sense.
  - creatonez 4y ago
    You might be right. I searched the name of the company and the CEO is a strong supporter of cryptocurrency, but there's no indication that their products are actually cryptocurrency related. Still wouldn't make sense for there to be a 10 minute wait, unless the backend servers are just as clogged and unusable as popular blockchains are. (Possibly crazy conspiracy theory w/ no basis in reality: The company is putting in `sleep(5mins + jitter)` into each transaction to prepare a fresh open-minded market for future cryptocurrency adoption when the legislative environment allows for it)
rldjbpin 4y ago
i can see how this might seem like a foreign idea for a speaker to announce how much you spent in a store to everyone nearby. but in practice, for small neighbourhood stores, this is just fine. a good implementation of hdi.
known 4y ago
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264 points by NDAjam 4y ago

Literacy rates in India look to be ~80% and climbing about 1% per year. Obviously it'll reach an asymptote, but it's looking like India already surpasses the US in this regard. Of course, given the large population, more Indians are illiterate than there are people in almost every nation. Nonetheless, wouldn't this solution be quite niche? Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/literacy-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/literacy-rat...

swamp40 4y ago
There is more going on here than literacy. Even if you are illiterate, if you tell someone to pay 10 rupees you could see if 10 rupees made it to your account. Do those vendors not have smartphones? That's what I am suspecting. If they did, an app could announce it and you wouldn't need the external speaker. The speakers seem to be directly connected to the cellular network. And rented for ridiculously small fees.
- alsodumb 4y ago
  Now that I think about it, I am not sure why they didn't just announce using the smartphone speaker - I've seen several vendors with smartphones still using these boxes. Granted, many vendors don't have smart phones, and perhaps sound boxes started with them. I think the fintech companies saw the opportunity and decided to not implement it their app for users with smartphone. Given that they are so cheap, I guess the vendors even with smart phones decided to get them anyway.
  - z3t4 4y ago
    It's difficult to wake up a phone to play custom audio. I believe iOS and Android has made that impossible without rooting the device.
    - wildzzz 4y ago
      You don't need to play custom audio. Notification narration already exists.
- vaidhy 4y ago
  Yes, the vendors have smartphones. The smartphones' speakers are not loud enough to announce over the road noise and general buzz in Indian shops. It would also be too distracting to keep looking down on the phone.
alsodumb 4y ago
I've interacted with several vendors who use these sound boxes. The article is a bit misleading in the sense that illiteracy is not the primary driver of the usage of these devices. It is a better check-out experience. Vendors were busy and annoyed by the fact that they have to use their phone to confirm payments which often hindered them from doing their routine to sell more stuff. Think about vendors making street foods, actively selling vegetables, etc. Now all they have to do is listen to the confirmation, directly streamed from the payment gateway vendor's server as soon as receive the money. Minor convenience, agreed, but the service isn't expensive to run (thanks to the minimal hardware it needs and the low data prices in India) and surprisingly even small vendors are okay with paying a subscription fee for it.
- db1234 4y ago
  +1. First time I came across these speakers was when I had tea in a road side tea stall off an highway. The shop was crowded and I held my phone at the owner to show him the evidence of payment which he ignored and within a couple of seconds my payment was announced on the speaker. Great experience!
- ajonit 4y ago
  Fraud was another reason for the emergence of these sound boxes. Android store was filled with fake payment screenshot generator apps. People would show the (fake) payment screenshot and leave the shop premises (saying “must be a network problem at your end.”) After multiple complaints from merchants, Paytm and the likes innovated this affordable idea.
- achow 4y ago
  Yes right. > The 48-year-old, who can neither read nor write, would need to call his son to confirm that the payment had been received. Looks like the author made up a narrative. These vendors definitely can read numbers, they manage loads of cash through the day. They do lightening fast calculation in their head - which would put a Math grad student to shame. They may not be able to read, write English (or other languages) but they are very comfortable with numbers and operations on them (addition, subtractions...). And they would not need "their son" to confirm the amount (they can read), and also they would recognize a very large green checkmark (an icon to confirm successful transaction), so don't need "their son" for that too.
t8sr 4y ago
I thought you were joking about India surpassing the US in literacy rates, and then I looked it up. It's 75 - 85% depending on how you count. What?! How is this number not 99.9%? Developed countries are at 100% or minus rounding error. Even Canada is at 99%, and that's next door. What is going on in the US?
- eru 4y ago
  I would suggest you double check what definition of literacy the different countries are using. Perhaps the US has a more stringent definition? As an example, for a long time Germany used a way to measure unemployment that yielded consistently higher numbers than most of the rest of the world. So any honest international comparison had to make adjustments. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States > In many nations, the ability to read a simple sentence suffices as literacy, and was the previous standard for the U.S. The definition of literacy has changed greatly; the term is presently defined as the ability to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential.[3]
  - bombcar 4y ago
    You also need to see if it’s from official reports based on testing or statistical reports based on surveys. Many people who are counted literate are functionally illiterate- they car recognize street signs, their name, etc but not much more.
- sriram_malhar 4y ago
  It is not a fair comparison. In India, the definition of "literacy" does not mean functional literacy in India ... merely knowledge of the alphabet is enough to qualify ("akshar gyan").
- nativespecies 4y ago
  Public education has been gutted for decades in this country.
sowbug 4y ago
But it's good that there are options. Many of us aged 40+ can't read HN-sized text anymore, and the prevalence of presbyopia among UI designers is evidently 0%. Throw in glare from sunlight, a busy storefront where you constantly need your hands and eyes elsewhere, etc.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> it's looking like India already surpasses the US in this regard Different standards. India is measuring base literacy, being able to "read and write with understanding a short simple statement about their everyday life" [1]. The comparable counter-statistic in the U.S. is Level 1 illiteracy, or being able to "unable to successfully determine the meaning of sentences, read relatively short texts to locate a single piece of information, or complete simple forms" in English [2]. That figure is 4.1%. (A Spanish-speaking physics PhD would count.) [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/literacy-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/literacy-rat... [2] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf
- Y_Y 4y ago
  You think you can get a PhD in physics without learning to read basic English? Not this century.
CyberDildonics 4y ago
> Obviously it'll reach an asymptote I think you mean the increase will level off. An "asymptote" would mean it is always getting closer to some target number, and there is no reason that would be 'obviously' true.
- flerchin 4y ago
  "Obviously, it'll asymptotically approach an upper bound and level off." I do think my meaning was clear, but yes you're correct.
aatharuv 4y ago
Africa is possibly another target. Its literacy rates are a little bit under India's, and it's another place where digital payments have gone big, even earlier than India. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SSF/sub-saharan-africa-/literacy-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SSF/sub-saharan-africa...
dirtyid 4y ago
20% (~300M) illiterate skews old, higher % of whom are active in workforce and will be for decades. Not that ~300M is "niche" as you said, but think of it technology that helps 50% of the workforce vs 20% of population.

sfifs 4y ago

I visited India a few times in the last 9 months after digital payments had taken off due to COVID and can attest that these have been game changers that have led shopkeeps to accept e-payments. More than anything to do with literacy, this basically allows Shopkeeper to keep doing what they are doing without fiddling with their phones etc to confirm they received money. The device just says the amount received out loud and at that point, the customer can leave with the goods. Haven't seen this tech anywhere else. In my latest trip, I don't believe I paid cash in any shop and I was in a second tier city the whole time, not one of the big metropolitan cities.

alsodumb 4y ago
Just to add to this, digital payments in India got popular well before COVID, significantly increasing after the demonetization charade (which imo was a bad decision and total chaos).
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  The increase due to demonetization cancelled out afterwards. The grown we see now came organically, later
- yashg 4y ago
  Demonetization induced usage reduced once cash was back in circulation. It was COVID era fear of touching cash and compulsion of lockdowns that really made digital payments hit the stratosphere.
  - asdted 4y ago
    Pre COVID transcations per month stood at 1.5b and now at 8.5B. COVID might have convinced few people that's all. Demonetization's effect is not clear since UPI came out just a year before Demonetization took place. It took off because of young generation and costs nothing as simple as that. They forced businesses and other to embrace it. Fun fact, i have been using UPI ever since it came out and used to pay for coconut/veggies with it even back in 2017

rkrishnaan 4y ago

Another thing that helps this boom is, in India no one has any problem in sharing their phone number with strangers. Delivery workers, Cab drivers, Restaurant waitlist, you name it. So payment send and receive with just mobile number as the primary key becomes easier.

villgax 4y ago
Wow not true at all, everybody hesitates to bring forced to give mobile number at the supermarket it cloth stores for no good reason than to feed into FB/Google in bulk. For paying a bill you're just scanning the QR most of the time, it's only P2P like cabs/autos when you may have to scan the drivers personal QR. Gpay & others apart from BHIM tend to already generate or allow alphanumeric UPI ID.
eru 4y ago
That seems to be working in Singapore as well.
hipratham 4y ago
There is also Virtual Payment Address (VPA) attached to account wiht legit number and bank acct which is good enough to use (share /scan QR code ) with merchant/user name.
Freedom2 4y ago
This is one of the most unique things about India that I haven't seen in any other country - the openness and community between its citizens. Especially proud to be Indian!

villgax 4y ago

They do charge a subscription fee for it, but sadly enough this could have been done with any speaker they had & using the official app as well

lotsofpulp 4y ago
But could it have been done with the resilience/volume/sound quality/redundancy/etc of the speaker? A situation that comes to mind is a vendor stepping away to go to the bathroom, and asking their neighboring vendor to sell while they are gone. A cheap enough, but fail proof and versatile solution is not necessarily a waste.
- jhatax 4y ago
  At less than a USD a month--currency vs. cost of living conversion--this subscription is extremely cheap considering the many positives: confirmation of payment from a new revenue stream, multiple language support, low-ish latency, fraud prevention for the seller. While a lot of Indians have smartphones, this speaker is the ideal example of a device that solves one specific problem and nothing else.
blntechie 4y ago
It's 200 Rs/mo as per a shopkeeper I talked to. It's pretty affordable for many shops as it cuts down on fraud a bit and they see utility in it.
pimlottc 4y ago
That would require leaving a smartphone and a speaker lying around where they might be stolen. Having it be a cheap, single-use device reduces the incentive for theft.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  You can buy a smartphone good enough for the job for less than 60 GBP even in the UK, I'm sure they can be had for considerably less in India. And it doesn't need to be lying around, the user can have it on them.

ck2 4y ago

Is it a crazy suggestion that you could put a display on the smart speaker and teach a small subset of literacy for them to see what is being said? Could someone learn a small amount that way? I've seen countless stories of people who come to the US and learn some english by watching TV with the close captions turned on, has to work elsewhere?

IronWolve 4y ago
More likely the audible confirmation allows everyone to know you paid, and the shopkeeper doesnt have to keep his eyes on a device all day. Easier for everyone.
alsodumb 4y ago
As discussed in other comments, illiteracy is not the primary driver of these devices. To some extent it is, but not a significant chunk. It’ll probably also make the device more expensive.
HeavyFeather 4y ago
What's cheaper to program and produce: a speaker or a display and chip? I think that this device is super smart. It's a "cell phone" chip that "reads" the texts out loud when received from a hardcoded number. It could cost a few dollars. The only cheaper thing would be upcycling existing smartphones, but that would be a support nightmare.

jjoonathan 4y ago

It's amazing how fintech can create actual value when they aren't all just fighting over who gets to salami slice a nation's commerce! > Digital payments have taken off in a big way in India in recent years due to the government’s unified payments interface (UPI)... But this boom hasn’t helped fintech companies in India as they do not make money from facilitating UPI transactions.

alsodumb 4y ago
There was definitely massive digital payments drive before the speakers, and the article is exaggerating it’s effects. However, there was a good chunk of vendors who were not happy with the ‘check your phone every time you get a payment’ routine and this solution works out for them perfectly.
raihansaputra 4y ago
Same is happening in Indonesia. The central bank standardized a QR code format for ~all digital payments and people can do cross-platform payments. Makes stuff so much easier.

ryzvonusef 4y ago

video of it in action (english subtitles) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUR84Qz0KbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUR84Qz0KbM

ape4 4y ago
So the merchant has to buy/rent a device. I expected it to be phone-to-phone for such wide acceptance.
- lazyninja987 4y ago
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- ryzvonusef 4y ago
  from my research, here is what I've found: 1- The govt insists the payments be done on their national backbone, which works on 0 markup, so companies have to find different avenues for revenue 2- The device is essentially a mobile phone with no display(newest version has a small pocket-calculator sized lcd, but most do not) and just four buttons: power, volume up, volume down, and repeat last message. It takes a SIM and has a rechargeable battery and a loud speaker. 3- This means essentially operators a renting a very specialised "dumb-phone"; one which has a simple audio output but no input (and thus access) to the actual app. They can leave this "phone" out in the public, while keeping their smartphone separate and secluded. 4- The device rent is lowered or even waived if you have a high-enough transaction volume. So for people who have a low usage, they can stick with checking their phone; for people with more frequent usage, it pays for it self. ---- I see a lot of benefits for this. AFAIK, each device is keyed to the user, so stealing it not beneficial, but even if some one did, no can use it to access the app or your funds, since all it does is receive confirmation SMS. There no training involved, and more importantly, no handover of a device anytime you to step away from a counter; anyone can take over and just listen to the confirmation message. one benefit the article mentioned is that people would dupe the seller by showing fake screenshots of a transaction, how that was eliminated by the device; no sound message, no payment. But the best benefit is the multi-tasking; you can use your hands and eyes to keep focused on the task at hand while using your ears to keep track of payments. Imagine a food-stall seller having to wipe their grease/sauce covered hands and fiddle with a slippery phone, anytime a customer paid, it would never work.

asdted 4y ago

Digital payment transactions stand at 8.5B per month. It's just mind-blowing

evan_ 4y ago

They talk about how sometimes people would show them doctored receipts to scam them- how much longer before people start recording the "Paid Rs 50" voice and playing it back off their phones? Not sure what the fix for that would be- reading off the time/date, a small integrated display, or maybe it's just not an issue.

jatins 4y ago
This speaker is with the merchant. I am sure the merchant can distinguish between a sound coming from their speaker vs sound coming from someone's mobile.

jack_riminton 4y ago

The vendor being able to instantly take out a loan is the real kicker here. If even a relatively small percentage of shopkeepers do this it will enable economic growth only seen in places like China in the 1990s, the effect will be multiplicative throughout the economy

WeylandYutani 4y ago
Only if they can pay back the loan otherwise you just end up with a banking crisis.
- jack_riminton 4y ago
  True but this isn’t inflation of assets it’s money for goods purchases by the sounds of it which is a lot less susceptible to bubbles
kridsdale1 4y ago
I was so happy to read that part. A triumph of capitalism, if it takes off. Everyone deserves the right to a fair and quick evaluation of their default risk to get access to capital on margin. It’s the best way to get people to invest in themselves and their communities.

kylehotchkiss 4y ago

I remember seeing these at vegetable stands and thinking it was a goofy shopkeeper quirk, didn't realize how useful of a feature this was to shopkeepers. Kudos to PayTM for a very good solution to speeding up digital payments across society

penguin_booze 4y ago

PhonePe translates to "on the phone" in Hindi. And, of course, it reads like "phone pay" in English. A nice touch.

throwaway280382 4y ago

Not mentioned in the article but I asked a shopkeeper why they use it. Answer is fraud. Earlier, customers would download a "fake" app, which miciked online gateway's UI. Customer would punch in money, and show to shopkeeper that "payment went through". Customer takes goods with them and leaves. Shopkeeper looses money. With this sound box, shopkeeper gives goods ONLY after the box makes sound. Now imagine if a elderly or illiterate relative of shopowner is manning the shop. They may not know how to operate their "banking" app to make sure money has reached. The sound box removes that problem.

kylehotchkiss 4y ago
"Fraud" is too friendly a word for this. It's just theft from a person who probably is having a much harder time making ends meet than the person stealing. Theft is never a pleasant topic but stealing from somebody with much less financial means than you is morally bankrupt.
rexf 4y ago
It's mentioned. > Balwant Singh, 32, runs a grocery store in New Delhi with his mother. He bought a Paytm Soundbox in 2020 after realizing digital payment receipts could be doctored. “[Before sound boxes], people were using apps to create fake payment receipts. I got conned a few times,” he told Rest of World. The soundbox does seem useful. What you mentioned is all in the article. > Abbas Ali, a vegetable vendor in an upscale neighborhood in New Delhi, started accepting digital payments in 2021. But every time a customer paid online, the 48-year-old, who can neither read nor write, would need to call his son to confirm that the payment had been received.

kwhitefoot 4y ago

Sounds very much like the Vipps system we have in Scandinavia, particularly Norway, with the addition of something like the Android Voice Notify app which reads Android notification. My mobile phone has been doing this for years. Whenever I receive a payment it reads it out to me. No need for any new devices.

AniseAbyss 4y ago

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bobse 4y ago

Sounds like globalists want to enslave India as well.

TheHappyOddish 4y ago

Am I crazy here? If you're buying a device, why not buy an EFTPOS (credit card/touch pay) machine that facilitates the transaction? Is Google/Apple Pay not prevelant in India? Given they're paying by their phone, surely it is? I feel like I'm missing something here, this method seems more complex than the now standard "tap your phone on the machine" in my country. The banks give them out for free or a small fee (they take a fee per transaction) or the vendors use a third party like Square.

pwn0 4y ago
The tap & pay model is an extension of payment using credit cards which has been the preferred payment method in the west for decades. On the other hand, credit cards never caught on in India, specially among the middle and lower middle class folks which is a large chunk of the population. So while the west underwent evolution from paper currency to credit cards to digital payments, India skipped the credit card generation and went straight for digital payments thanks to cheap android phones and free/subsidized/cheap 3G/4G data costs.
tpreetham 4y ago
The reason could because of how these payments apps evolved. People already had cheap android phones in their hand. After the 4g boom, many got their first smartphone. UPI related playment apps started with QR code scanning, just like in China. There is no extra cost to the vendor. All they need is a sticker with their QR, which customers can scan. Later, they came up with a (bluetooth) speaker which can announce payments. It doesn't even need a connected smartphone. If they used cards, they need to manufacture it and the readers. Ship them to their home addresses (which is complicated and lossy), train them about card usage. For many vendors who accepted UPI payments, it was their first time accepting something other than cash as payments.

tony_antony 4y ago

> Six months after subscribing, Singh received an instant loan of 3 lakh rupees (around $3,600) from Paytm. He used the money to add more products to his store. “I had never thought of taking up a loan since it involves lots of paperwork and could take months to get processed. Here, I got it instantly so I took it up,” he said. After he paid it off, Singh took another loan from Paytm for 5 lakh rupees (around $6,000). This a brilliant strategy for generating proof of financial transactions and thus making small businesses eligible for credit.

creatonez 4y ago

Why is it taking 10 minutes to confirm payment...? Edit: For some reason it's mentioned nowhere in the article, but it's because these are cryptocurrency transactions

s_dev 4y ago
Another user is claiming: >Not mentioned in the article but I asked a shopkeeper why they use it. Answer is fraud. Earlier, customers would download a "fake" app, which miciked online gateway's UI. Customer would punch in money, and show to shopkeeper that "payment went through". Customer takes goods with them and leaves. Shopkeeper looses money. I don't think half of India is using crypto currency transactions everyday. So this explanation makes more sense.
- creatonez 4y ago
  You might be right. I searched the name of the company and the CEO is a strong supporter of cryptocurrency, but there's no indication that their products are actually cryptocurrency related. Still wouldn't make sense for there to be a 10 minute wait, unless the backend servers are just as clogged and unusable as popular blockchains are. (Possibly crazy conspiracy theory w/ no basis in reality: The company is putting in `sleep(5mins + jitter)` into each transaction to prepare a fresh open-minded market for future cryptocurrency adoption when the legislative environment allows for it)

rldjbpin 4y ago

i can see how this might seem like a foreign idea for a speaker to announce how much you spent in a store to everyone nearby. but in practice, for small neighbourhood stores, this is just fine. a good implementation of hdi.

known 4y ago

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