Our friends at Google have an experimental computerized telephone speech recognition system all ready for us to try out. . .for free.
Google makes finding and connecting your phone to a specific business from any city in the United States fun and easy.
By calling 800-466-4411 or 800-GOOG-411 from any phone, you will be able to test their new voice-activated service called “Google Voice Local Search,” free-of-charge.
This computerized system is located in Google’s experimental lab site in Mountain View, California.
The service runs on computers and uses no human operators.
“Using this service, you get fast access to the same local information you’d find on Google Maps,” an explanation of the new experiment said on the Google labs site. “You don’t need a computer, you don’t need an Internet connection, and you don’t even need to use your cell phone keypad,” it said.
Of course, now I was curious so I reached for my phone I just had to try it out for myself.
I called the number and was greeted with a friendly sounding computerized male voice that announced, “Calls recorded for quality. . .GOOG 411. . .experimental. . .what city and state?”
The computerized voice needs a name, so I will call it “Goog411.”
“Delano, Minnesota,” I said, articulating my words carefully.
“Delano, Minnesota,” Goog411 replied.
“What business name or category?” The computerized voice on the other end of the phone asked me.
All right, I was ready for that question.
“Restaurants,” I said confidently.
“Restaurants,” quickly repeated the voice from Google.
In less than a second, the Google voice came back and said, “Top eight results. . .number one. . .” (I was then given the name of a well-known Delano restaurant along with its address.) The voice then says, “To select number one you can press or say number one.’”
Goog411 went on to name the next number of the restaurant on their list but was nice enough to mention that I could say, “Go back” or . . . if I wanted to start a brand new search I could say, “Start over,” at any time.
When I heard the number of the restaurant (number one) that I wanted to know more about, all I needed to do was to say, “Number one . . . details.” Goog411 responded with, “You can also get the details by saying text message.’”
Google has an option to allow the information details to be sent via a text message to my cell phone.
The computerized voice then goes on to repeat the address and the phone
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