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Tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India

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Re: Tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India

#61

Post by spaceman_2020 »

alsodumb wrote: post #21
sfifs wrote: post #3

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 lo…

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).

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.

Re: Tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India

#62

Post by 908B64B197 »

SaltyGoodness wrote: post #24
t8sr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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. Peopl…

> 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.

Re: Tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India

#63

Post by evan_ »

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.

Re: Tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India

#64

Post by fandorin »

ryzvonusef wrote: post #49
ape4 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the merchant has to buy/rent a device. I expected it to be phone-to-phone for such wide acceptance.

from my research, here is what I've found: 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…

do you think such payment flow would work in the US / in the EU as well? I know that for example in Sweden Swish is super popular and you can pay with it in stores by scanning QR code (and then showing your phone to the merchant) - seems like such device could fit there perfectly.

Re: Tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India

#65

Post by jatins »

evan_ wrote: post #63

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.

Re: Tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India

#66

Post by dirtyid »

flerchin wrote: post #2

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? Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/literacy-rat...

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.

Re: Tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India

#67

Post by jack_riminton »

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

Re: Tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India

#68

Post by z3t4 »

alsodumb wrote: post #8
swamp40 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India

#69

Post by kylehotchkiss »

I remember seeing these at vegetable stands and thinking it was a goofy shopkeeper quirk, didn't realize how useful of a feature this was to shopkeepers. Kudos to PayTM for a very good solution to speeding up digital payments across society

Re: Tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India

#70

Post by LoveMortuus »

hedora wrote: post #45
sfifs wrote: post #3

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 lo…

This makes so much more sense than illiteracy. The phone app could just have a thumbs up with a number or a thumbs down, after all. It suggests having a tv-like display would work about as well, and be less noisy / distracting.

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.
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