Goog411 Has Served Its Purpose
Today Google announced that it will stop offering its free, automated directory assistance service (1-800-GOOG411), effective November 11. It’s hard to believe that it has been up and running for almost three years. It launched as a very disruptive force in the directory assistance community. In Google’s inimitable way, it offered for free a service for which other providers attached as high as a $3.00 per call charge. During those years, wireless DA services offered through incumbent carriers witnessed annual erosion in call volumes in the 30 percent range.
Now that the damage has been done, the question is “where will wireless subscribers go for free access to business listings?” Google notes that they can text their queries to 466453 (“GOOGLE”) or, for those with smartphones, use the “voice search” feature of the downloadable Google App. The blog post also notes that free calls directly to businesses can be initiated from the Gmail app on a smart phone.
This is the end of a phase in Google’s evolutionary approach to voice search. The company has long said that offering Goog411 provided a good mechanism for collecting a steady stream of utterances to help tune and refine its speech recognition engine (street names and business names are notoriously hard to “get right”). That work is complete. Apparently, providing “voice search”, “voice input” and “voice actions”, will provide sufficient new material to keep the underlying grammar both fresh and accurate.
Meanwhile, we’d expect some queries to return to traditional DA platform.s
Hi, 1800GOOG411 was an innovative idea from Google and it’s sad to see that it dint work out. Mostly, I think the reason it did not work out was because too many things were automated. Recently I heard of Justdial, a 24 x 7 operator assisted toll free concierge service. I dialed 1800-500-0000 to try the service and was amazed when a human voice answered & I was done within 60 seconds. Justdial really delivered what they promised.
And yet another great service is going to shut down, because of lousy marketing department in Google! The big problem with Google is that they don’t know how to market their great technologies and make money out of them. In this case their objection is that since they developed native apps for smartphones they don’t see any advantage in Goog-411 and therefore they won’t continue the service. I guess they should look into numbers, even in US the majority of people still use regular phones rather than Smart phones. So this is not a good excuse to abandon this great service.
Whit this attitude, Google is going to lose its customers, especially now that they step into Enterprise with their Google Apps. With this attitude, there is no guaranty for businesses to switch to Google and layout their needs on Google Services, because Google might withdraw those services with or without any reasons. i.e. Just in May, 2010 @Google IO they announced that they are opening Google Waves for Apps’ users and couple months later they retired Wave! It’s hard to trust on experimental technologies, and that is why Google hasn’t been able to make money on most of its products except the search.
Google! Please change this attitude!
I had been a frequent user of the 1800GOOG411 service. It’s a good feeling to know that information is just one phone call away. I was really disheartened when I heard of it shutting down sometime back. One of my friends suggested calling 1800-500-0000, a toll-free service by Justdial. This service will not cease to amaze you. It has human-assisted service, one ring pick up, and they also connect you to the local vendors. Simply amazing!