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

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?

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.

> 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.

  - 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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

Still wouldn't make sense for there to be a 10 minute wait, unless the backend servers are just as clogged and unusable as popular blockchains are.

(Possibly crazy conspiracy theory w/ no basis in reality: The company is putting in `sleep(5mins + jitter)` into each transaction to prepare a fresh open-minded market for future cryptocurrency adoption when the legislative environment allows for it)