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.
> 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.
If you’re a tourist or business visitor, this isn’t possible. UPI isn’t available to you. Also note that many smaller shops which accept cards and do accept India-issued MasterCard/Visa/Rupay won’t take MC/Visa issued abroad, because their payment providers charge them extra.
Digital payments for business visitors and tourists in India are pretty terrible outside of upscale places.
If you’re an Indian living abroad, for now, you need to keep an Indian phone number active to use UPI (this should change soon). You can use cards though, especially if you have an India-issued card — those have much wider acceptance.
It's surprisingly common to just forget tourists/newcomers to your country exist. I've visited Brazil and I could not activate a SIM card I bought because it expected me to put in a CPF, a local equivalent of a SSN which obviously, as a tourist, I did not have. Many places which offered services to tourists (in English!) still expected a CPF to let me book entrance, for example.
Even living in the EU, oftentimes showing any other document than a citizen ID card issued in the country you're in will cause stress, confusion and nervous phone calls.
I agree, India in general has pretty bad bureaucracy against tourists, it feels like the government doesn't care at all about attracting them.
But I recently saw that Wise supports transferring money to India via UPI (also more anecdotally - I am living in Singapore and saw that some local banks have this feature as well). I guess this won't be as comfortable as just scanning a QR, but couldn't this technically work for tourists?
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).
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.
At the end of the day, nothing beats convenience. If the tech and the ecosystem was the same as it is today, it would have found adoption even without demonetization.
I sometimes go weeks without realizing that I have literally zero cash in my wallet.
I was using UPI so much that my credit card usage had dropped to almost nothing. Literally had to force myself to use the credit card more to accumulate some rewards.
>I sometimes go weeks without realizing that I have literally zero cash in my wallet.
That's pretty much my experience in the US. I probably have the same cash in my wallet that I've had for 5 or more years ... if there's any in there .. duno.
The difference is that I have that experience because of credit cards.
Ironically, it's for Uber (and Ola) - the services that made us move away from cash for taxi and auto in the first place - that I have to carry cash for since the drivers just won't come without cash payments. UPI is better, but they will have the have to fill petrol excuse.
After reading this article so much makes sense. I’m currently at the end of my annual trip here seeing family and I have been hearing these things all over the shop.
I didn’t pay much thought to it until now if I am honest. Genius and great to see tech companies do something to actually help people solve real world problems.
I think a display might consume much more power than a speak, these look like they could, if they aren't already, powered with batteries, while a display could also be powered with batteries it wouldn't last nearly as long, not to mention that you can hear this even if you're not looking at it.
> 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.
I’ve seen this in China many years ago on both PoS terminals and smartphones. Guess it shouldn’t be surprising that Paytm brought this to India, given that Alibaba/Ant Financial at one point had a significant stake in it.
This role is played by the smart phones in China. The customers pay by scanning the printed QR code, and upon success, the WeChat or Alipay app on the vendor's phone reads out the amount loud.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
+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!
- 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?
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.
> 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.)
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.
> 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]
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").
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I was going to comment on this post wondering how it's more efficient than just the merchant looking at a fixed screen which shows the incoming transactions.
But the video demonstrates why the audio interface is better, it allows them to multi-task. Sort of like how listening to radio/podcasts doesn't tie you down to somewhere like watching the TV does.
Exactly! I expounded in a comment below, but among the benefits, imagine being elbow deep in batter and having to check transactions, better a speaker that tells you.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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.
If you’re a tourist or business visitor, this isn’t possible. UPI isn’t available to you. Also note that many smaller shops which accept cards and do accept India-issued MasterCard/Visa/Rupay won’t take MC/Visa issued abroad, because their payment providers charge them extra.
Digital payments for business visitors and tourists in India are pretty terrible outside of upscale places.
If you’re an Indian living abroad, for now, you need to keep an Indian phone number active to use UPI (this should change soon). You can use cards though, especially if you have an India-issued card — those have much wider acceptance.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/invest/in-bound-tra...
Even living in the EU, oftentimes showing any other document than a citizen ID card issued in the country you're in will cause stress, confusion and nervous phone calls.
But I recently saw that Wise supports transferring money to India via UPI (also more anecdotally - I am living in Singapore and saw that some local banks have this feature as well). I guess this won't be as comfortable as just scanning a QR, but couldn't this technically work for tourists?
I was using UPI so much that my credit card usage had dropped to almost nothing. Literally had to force myself to use the credit card more to accumulate some rewards.
Moreover, within a year or so, UPI will start accepting Credit card linking as well. Things are really moving FAST here.
That's pretty much my experience in the US. I probably have the same cash in my wallet that I've had for 5 or more years ... if there's any in there .. duno.
The difference is that I have that experience because of credit cards.
I do have enough cash in a side section of my wallet to get me home by taxi from a reasonable distance - just in case.
I didn’t pay much thought to it until now if I am honest. Genius and great to see tech companies do something to actually help people solve real world problems.
It suggests having a tv-like display would work about as well, and be less noisy / distracting.
I’ve seen this in China many years ago on both PoS terminals and smartphones. Guess it shouldn’t be surprising that Paytm brought this to India, given that Alibaba/Ant Financial at one point had a significant stake in it.
> 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.
Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/literacy-rat...
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.
> 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.
After multiple complaints from merchants, Paytm and the likes innovated this affordable idea.
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.
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
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?
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]
I think you got it right there. Be wary of cross-nation statistics without context.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SSF/sub-saharan-africa...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUR84Qz0KbM
I was going to comment on this post wondering how it's more efficient than just the merchant looking at a fixed screen which shows the incoming transactions.
But the video demonstrates why the audio interface is better, it allows them to multi-task. Sort of like how listening to radio/podcasts doesn't tie you down to somewhere like watching the TV does.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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.