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.

+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!

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.

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.

I wouldn't be so sure about the author making up the narrative, it very well could be real but it is definitely not the majority.

I get what you are saying, but none of this would put "a Math grad student to shame". If you really think it does, you definitely have no clue what grad students do - sincerely, a grad student whose best friend is a math grad student.

I saw college students (not indian) fail to answer basic arithmetic questions like 50-13 stuff like that.

He meant they do basic calculations very fast with out a calculator.

I am pretty sure many math grad students are not that great at mental arithmetic, which is the topic here. We are obviously not talking about the kind of advanced maths grad students to.

It is an interesting topic. I remember seeing an article about teaching maths to shopkeepers kids in third world countries. By western standards, they are quasi-illiterate. They are however remarkably good at tasks like giving change. When asked about their reasoning, it involves exchanging bills and goods rather than abstract numbers, and IIRC, they do better than western schoolkids of the same age.

How exactly does the experience work? e.g:

  - How does the customer know how much to send and where?
  - How quickly does the confirmation come through?  Does it say who the money is from?
  - What happens if the vendor is distracted and misses the confirmation for a particular order?

1. The merchant tells them the amount and there's a QR code on the box to scan.

2. Within seconds. When I paid while over there it was 2 - 5 seconds. It doesn't say who the money is from though.

3. The merchant has to check their phone or trust the screen on the customers phone.

It works surprisingly well for 95% of use cases. Usually more than one person isn't checking out in parallel. It lets the merchant continue cooking / packing your items / pouring a tea for someone else / etc.

Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUR84Qz0KbM

I would just assume that the vendor's payment app would just play a chime and maybe a readout of the amount received. Every payment app I've used has a notification with name and total when I get money. I'm pretty sure Android can already handle this anyway. Connect the phone to a speaker if you need it louder. Seems like a much cheaper solution than buying a speaker with a built-in modem that you have to pay a monthly fee for unless you just don't own a smartphone.

Not being a street vendor, I’d guess that you:

A) definitely don’t want to leave a smartphone someplace easy to check

B) don’t want to take the time to unlock your smartphone to see the notification

C) do want something that can notify you without taking your attention away from three other customers

Hmm... but the phones too have speakers, they could have just made their to app read it just like the speaker does it.

Even busy vendors are hopefully able to triangulate. If fraud like that takes off I imagine they’d just relocate the speakers to a high, rear location where customers could never fake it.

Would you live your smartphone out? And it would also eventually drain the battery/fall/get wet

I really think the form factor is great.

I guess you can’t choose tips so American can’t use it. But I find it a good example of less intrusive tech.

>It is a better check-out experience.

This is exactly it! I remember the time before these speakers became commonplace. You had to wait while the vendor checked his phone, argue if there is a delay in SMS notification, crowded environments meant waiting your turn and in general it was a very real hassle. With these speakers, you do the payment, yell out saying you have done it and go your way (async I/O :-) .

It is one of those small things whose impact is huge in practice. It is a lesson to us techie folks to always concentrate on the "real user experience" rather than imagined ones.

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?

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

> 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]

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.

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").

Public education has been gutted for decades in this country.

Public K-12 education spending increased from 2.3% of American GDP in 1950 to 5.5% of GDP in 2015. [0]

See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/us-education-expenditure-... (as linked from https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-commentary-is... )

Educational achievement in the US has been roughly the same as in the 1950s. It seems almost as if public education doesn't matter?

[0] Keep in mind that American real GDP per capital increased enormously over time as well. See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA

I was stunned to learn that the average American reads at a 5th grade level. It's true though. I've been wondering why for a while, since it explains so much... Here's my best guess:

13 million children face daily hunger, and politicians fight to take away school lunches. Hungry kids don't learn too good.

Fear porn is blasted over every corporate media outlet constantly, to the point where it saturates culture. People who feel unsafe don't learn too good.

Schools are funded based on local taxes. Neither political 'team' seems determined to change this. Teachers often have to buy school supplies out of their own meagre pocket. Kids in schools that don't have money don't learn too good.

School boards refuse to integrate modern understanding of best practices - homework is useless, school starts too early, multi-modal learning works way better, spaced repetition works great, bullying isn't a fact of life to be accepted and ignored. Bullied, tired kids don't learn too good.

Publishing monopolies charge hundreds of dollars for textbooks, altering 1984 and children's stories to be "safer", and holding back anything that might upset their comfortable position.

Hundreds of years of the world's most sophisticated anti-intellectual propaganda has allowed America to be world leaders in producing people that think education is scary.

Blaming poor people for their own problems is a national sport.

These attitudes have been with America for hundreds of years, and no amount of fight from Mark Twain, or Thoreau, or Einstein, or Bernie has changed those fundamentals of American culture.

There's no political motive to change any of this. As George Carlin put it so well: "Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation." America are undisputed world leaders in this (except in America, where this is seen as socialist talk and therefore safe to ignore).

Media, corporations and government conspire to prevent any third party or group from changing the social situation - look at what happened to OWS, or MLK, or Fred Hampton.

Any progression toward helping people get safe and educated is labeled communism, and the DNC conspires with media to mess up anyone too "radical" that runs as a Democrat.

Nobody on TV talks about how many teachers we could have trained with the 20 trillion dollars spent bombing Middle Eastern families - it's a lot.

So, a lot is going on in America. I didn't even mention the drugs, the housing situation, the bank crises, the environmental poisoning, the disconnection from nature, the lack of exercise, the poor quality food or God knows how much else.

Some will say I must hate America to write this stuff - people who say things like this get accused of being Putin's puppets, or worse, socialists. But I love America, which is why I hate to see what is happening to it and refuse to pretend these problems will be solved without even acknowledging them.

There are two causes to consider. The failure of society to provide equal opportunities to all, and the failure of individuals to capitalize on what opportunities they have available.

The trouble with your criticism is that you are focusing entirely on society’s failures, when a more complete analysis would consider what can be done on either side.

Sure, everyone ought to do what they can to better themselves. That's for another comment, because the question was, what is it about America that has literacy skills at such a shameful level.

It's not Brad's fault that he can't read good. It's not Chad's fault that he hasn't picked up a book. These hypothetical kids are 6, 7, 8 years old.

That's on us, and our willingness to allow their home lives to be miserable rather than pay for mental health supports and education as a society.

Parents should be putting books into these kids hands. Society can not replace the role of a parent.

We can and should help the parents, and the first step is assessing the root of the problem, and sometimes that looks a lot more like laying blame than some folks are willing to do

> and the failure of individuals to capitalize on what opportunities they have available

Yeah, we could blame the 5 year olds for their lack of grit and determination to create their foundation for their reading skills. Alternatively, we can look at what other societies achieve, and try to improve our own.

Also you are completely ignoring that plenty of people have functional difficulties learning to read and write. Anecdotally I would say over 10% based on my dyslexic or illiterate friends and family, some of which had professional focused help beyond what schooling provides. I agree with you that the education system has its faults, and some people “fail to capitalise opportunities”. However there is a large segment of people that are motivated, work hard, get good educational opportunities, and yet still struggle to read and write. There are people with denial or bullshit reasons too, but too many of my friends and family have symptoms that I have good reasons to believe they are not making anything up.

We shouldn’t blame 5 year olds, sure, but their parents? Fair game IMO.

This is not to say that society is without blame, but I feel that personal responsibility is increasingly left out of the public discourse

Your post includes some good commentary identifying issues with the educational system, specifically about fostering a healthy, effective learning environment as well as commentary about mis-allocating resources. However, it also includes lots of specific blaming and accusations which, to me, distracted from the helpful elements.

I'm curious if you think the best path forward would be to keep pushing for the federal government to do better with education, or if it would be better to empower more local entities to improve. This could be state, county, or city governments, or even private school systems.

How does Finland do it? Copy them as much as possible, since it's clearly working. Gaps in Finlands system? Pay experts to figure it out. I don't claim to be an expert - you don't need to be, to see how bad the current system is.

If we can afford $20 trillion on interest payments for illegal wars on the other side of the planet, we can figure out how to fund schools.

Not sure what you mean by "specific blaming and accusations" - there are real forces fighting back against educating children in a safe and happy environment.

They're not even that sneaky about it. Pretending that extremely well funded and organised and power groups are not, for example, banning books, abortion, cutting school funds, cancelling school lunch programs, giving millions in TANF funds to dried out quarterbacks, etc, etc, is like ignoring the termites eating away at the foundations of your house while spending all your money on grenades to protect from home invaders.

> If we can afford $20 trillion on interest payments for illegal wars on the other side of the planet, we can figure out how to fund schools.

This assumes that schooling makes a difference.

> Schools are funded based on local taxes. Neither political 'team' seems determined to change this. Teachers often have to buy school supplies out of their own meagre pocket. Kids in schools that don't have money don't learn too good.

This one is mostly a myth. States and federal grants will equalize money per pupil across different school districts. Some of the worst performing school districts in the country also have the highest per-capital spending.

This stat probably includes older Americans in their 80s and 90s. Many immigrated in their teens, from small villages, in the early 1940s/50s. Let's say you left rural Italy in 1940, as an 11 year old. Started working in America at 16, in 1946. Many jobs in America at that time didn't require much literacy, for example working in a textile mill, or an assembly line.

I'm not sure our Department of Education is effective, and I think some children actually are being left behind, despite the "no child left behind" effort.

Why even consider that another standard could be in use, like others have pointed out in the thread, when you have political priors to confirm? Stay classy HN!

What? It’s widely known that over half of American adults read at or below a sixth grade level. This is a result from 2020 so it shouldn’t be news to you.

The astonishing fact in need of explaining was the absolute American statistic, but why it was smaller than the rates for eg India.

> depending on how you count

I think you got it right there. Be wary of cross-nation statistics without context.

I suspect a lot of this is variance on surveying methods. I could see "Literacy" be defined anywhere from "able to read the survey enough to pick out where to mark "yes/no" and "sign here"" to "Able to read YA novels", and in the US it could well be "English literacy" versus "Any literacy". I knew plenty of kids growing up who had grandparents living with them that could read Mandarin or Spanish just fine, but who had pretty limited English skills.

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, and a busy storefront where you constantly need your hands and eyes elsewhere, etc.

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.

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.

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.

You don't need to play custom audio. Notification narration already exists.

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.

> 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-rat...

[2] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf

You think you can get a PhD in physics without learning to read basic English? Not this century.

> 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.

"Obviously, it'll asymptotically approach an upper bound and level off." I do think my meaning was clear, but yes you're correct.

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...

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.