Revisiting “Hole in the Wall” Computing: Private Smart Speakers and Public Slum Settings

Millions of homes worldwide enjoy access to digital content and services through smart speakers such as Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home. Promotional materials and users’ own videos typically show homes that have many well-resourced rooms, with good power and data infrastructures. Over the last several years, we have been working with slum communities in India, whose dwellings are usually very compact (one or two rooms), personal home WiFi is almost unheard of, power infrastructures are far less robust, and financial resources put such smart speakers out of individual household reach. Inspired by the “hole in the wall” internet-kiosk programme, we carried out workshops with slum inhabitants to uncover issues and opportunities for providing a smart-speaker-type device in public areas and passageways. We designed and deployed a simple probe that allowed passers-by to ask and receive answers to questions. In this paper, we present the findings of this work, and a design space for such devices in these settings.