Paul Boutin's GOOG-411 Test

Paul Boutin says: "While everyone else is pontificating on what the GOOG-411 billboards around the country must mean, I called the number a few dozen times during lunch to test it. I think of Cory every time it answers -- not with a hello but with 'Calls recorded for quality.'"

I spent a half hour speed-dialing Google's new phone directory service, 800-GOOG-411. The verdict? Google's speech-recognition and geo-mapping algorithms outperformed Verizon and AT&T's humans this afternoon. GOOG-411 figured out that "Dover-Foxcroft" was a town in Maine rather than bouncing me to an operator. It deduced that "H H Brown Shoes" meant a store in nearby Dexter. It let me talk with my mouth full. But the service makes an irritatingly un-Googly first impression on callers.

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Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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kinokino

i think the impression is very googly…..i don’t get it.
DragonPhyre

The article is nothing like the blurb. WTF?
wugmump

i think it’s very google, actually… no nonsense, to the point. time is money!
caseyd

If you think this is great, just wait
until you get a google phone!

The gmail addbar will seem quaint compared to what voice recognition based indexing of your cell phone life will provide you.

or provide you to.
tpaperny

I’ve been using it for a few weeks now. The different childish high-pitched voice that says “Goog-411″ at the start of every call is really creepy.

And I’ve had some navigation troubles, where it won’t let me interrupt the list of “top hits.” Still a bit glitch-y, but better than regular ol’ 411 because you can narrow a search by entering an intersection (that function isn’t always presented to me, though…)
Monster

“The different childish high-pitched voice that says ‘Goog-411′ at the start of every call is really creepy.”

Actually, I think the voices are random. Sometimes different women, sometimes different men, sometimes a child.
Robert

Meh… it didn’t get the new (2 week old) bank branch in my town. I guess it just relies on the phone company’s listings…
phrits

I’ve been using it off and on for a couple of months with spotty results. Something as common as (the only) Wendy’s restaurant in Blacksburg, VA should have been an easy hit but wasn’t. It’s also a little clunky with a big list–say Wendy’s in Charlotte, NC–so there’s definitely some room to build in filtering by street address or whatever.

That said, it’s still my first hit. The price is right.