GOOG-411 graduates from Labs
Posted by Jonathan Matus, Product
Marketing Manager
A few years ago, my younger brother won a car in a raffle. He
wanted to share this good news with the entire family, so he
decided to keep it a secret until we were all together at
dinnertime. But good news is hard to keep; he couldn't wait,
and by lunchtime we all knew about our new car. And now we have
some exciting news of our own that we just can't contain any
longer.
Many of you explored
discovered a local business info service that's totally free.
It's called GOOG-411 and it helps callers find and connect with
local businesses just by dialing 1-800-GOOG-411. It's a
voice-based local search service, which means it uses
speech-recognition algorithms to recognize what a caller is saying
and then finds the local business information he or she is looking
for. These algorithms had to be trained with real utterances, much
like how a baby learns language by listening to its parents. Since
its unveiling in April, GOOG-411 has successfully served millions
of callers. And we owe a big thanks to everyone who took our speech
recognition algorithms from infancy to adulthood!
People have been spreading the word about GOOG-411 to their friends
and families. And now we're happy to report that our local
business info service has officially graduated from Labs. To mark
the occasion, we're celebrating with a
website that includes this fun video:
When you watch the video, pay extra attention to the people you
meet at the end. One of them is the real voice behind GOOG-411.
Think you can guess who it is? When you call 1-800-GOOG-411, listen
closely and see if you can identify which team member shown in the
video is the voice. Then, post your answer as a comment on
page.
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