smsguru

In India, everyone has a mobile phone but many mobile phones are not smart phones. There are also many regions in the country with cell service but no 2/3/4 G service. In such situations, people cannot access the internet. This prevents students in such situations to access knowledge. While I was fortunate enough to be able to satisfy my curiosity by doing a quick google search, many students lacked this basic convenience. To solve this problem, I developed an SMS based information retrieval system that allows students from underprivileged and remote areas to access the internet. To do a google search, they send their query to the service via SMS and they get a response via SMS in their native language. The service uses natural language processing to parse the query, searches the internet using web drivers and APIs of various search services, and then returns the best possible response.