GOOG-411

» see google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

goog-411 was a united states and canada phone number, and from turkey it was just a number that would not connect. that is the whole distance. you dialed 1-800-goog-411, said the name of a business out loud, and google's voice recognition found it and put the call through for nothing. it was a small marvel if you were sitting in the country it worked in. i was not.

it launched on april 6, 2007. the pitch was simple and honest on its face: the traditional 411 directory-assistance lines the phone companies ran were slow and could cost real money per call, and google would do the same thing for free by voice. you spoke, it listened, it read back results and connected you. no operator, no charge.

for a couple of years it was a genuinely useful thing that people in the us and canada actually used from their cars and their kitchens. it never occurred to most of them to ask why google, a company with no phone business, was running a free directory line at its own expense. the answer was the interesting part, and it did not come out until google shut it down.

~ the case file ~

~ the funny part ~

goog-411 was never really a directory service. it was a microphone. google needed enormous amounts of recorded human speech, all kinds of accents and bad phone connections, to train the voice recognition it wanted to build for phones and search. a free 411 line was a clever way to get millions of people to read business names into a recorder for nothing. every call made the models better. the service was the bait and the voices were the product.

~ how it actually ended ~

once google had enough voice data, the line had done its job. voice search and voice actions showed up on android, trained in part on everything goog-411 had gathered, and the phone number was no longer needed. google announced the shutdown in october 2010 and pulled the plug on november 12. it did not really die so much as graduate. the free service people liked was the scaffolding for something bigger, and google took the scaffolding down once the building stood. from turkey i only ever met the result, the voice recognition, never the phone line that fed it.

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