Saturday, April 7, 2007

Google Voice Local Search

It’s been a while since the Google Labs page has been updated with anything substantial. Well, today there’s a new service to be found there: Google Voice Local Search. This free and still experimental service allows you to call 1-800-GOOG-411 fom your US phone, and then state your location and say something like “Giovanni’s Pizzeria” to get connected to the business. Haochi in the forum describes what happens:

You call, they tell you they will record the call for quality, tell you that it’s “experimental” and then start asking you questions

1. City and State (me: Columbus, Ohio)
2. Query (me: apple store) – Google returns: Textcode
3. Query (me: movie) – Google returns: movie
4. Then they will read the top 8 results, you can say “1st result” or press 1 for the first result, and so on.
5. There you can get more detail about the business or send them a text message if you are on a cell.

I will give it a 6/10 for voice recognition.

Nate remarks, “I programmed this as a voice command for my cell phone. Works pretty slick. I can basically use this as a free 411. The voice prompts are pretty good and very intuitive.”

Odeo lets you listen to a recording of this.

[Thanks Garett, NateDawg, Haochi and Bilal!]

Join the ongoing comments.

Google Voice Local Search by Philipp Lenssen

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