The recent move towards user-generated content in social media has resulted in the proliferation of online content production services such as wikis, blogs, and photo sharing websites. One of the most successful technologies in this realm is online classifieds services, such as Craigslist. This service allows users to post advertisements, such as rentals, jobs, consumer goods, tickets, automobiles, along with the means to contact the poster of the advertisement. Such user-driven websites allow anyone with access to the technology to create and edit content, for free.

However, in lower-income countries fraught with issues of bad connectivity, spectrum management, and policy hurdles, these online services are yet to achieve noticeable penetration. Moreover, the typical user in these regions has low literacy skills, and little or no computing experience. There are also differences between the social and the cultural norms of the designer and the user populations. This, in turn, results in a mismatch between the cognitive and the conceptual models that the users have and the traditional interaction metaphors in interfaces. The United Nations estimates the total number of illiterate adults to be 799 million worldwide, 270 million of which are located in India alone.

VoiceList is a solution to combat the issues mentioned above. Specifically,

1. VoiceList circumvents literacy by remaining operable through speech
2. It can be accessed by any phone - shared or private, mobile or landline. VoiceList does not run on the client side, overcoming limitations of device obsolescence. It helps create content solely through the phone.
3. It is a natural extension to everyday conversations by remaining an audio interface and proposes to flatten the learning curve
4. VoiceList is general-purpose and can be customized to any domain, such as healthcare, agriculture, fisheries, and so on. It is the information that drives the system
5. It is location-dependant, but can scale to greater geographical radii.
6. VoiceList pushes forward audio information retrieval, navigation paradigms, folksonomy, and hybrid realities.

VoiceList is a telephone-based, user-generated audio classified service. It provides a means to post and access voice content to/from a central database. VoiceList is informed by the traditional forms of posting services and advertisements, such as classifieds and word-of-mouth. It customizes the classifieds based on the user's location. By remaining independent of the literacy skills and the extra operational operating costs, our hope is that VoiceList would merge into the existing set of practices. Since VoiceList can be accessed by simply by dialing a phone number, it does not impose additional technical requirements.