Free directory information coming your way?

With the advent of 1-800-GOOG-411 and the soon too be Microsoft 1-800-555-TELL it seems that consumers could soon be presented with some real high quality free speech recognition driven directory services. That's a nice change from paying the exhorbitant fees that SBC-ATT-whatever-it-is-this-month wants to charge us. However given that most of us are using mobile phones for personal calls the majority of the day we'll still have to burn precious airtime minutes for those calls.

My initial experiments with 1-800-GOOG-411 were quite positive, not 100% since it consistently failed to give me the number for my partners business, however everything else worked pretty well. It would be nice if they could roll in information on local stuff like movie times, I'm sure that will arrive in due course. As for TellMe, well they have been doing this since the early dot.com days and Google should have bought them as they almost certainly have superior voice technology.

In the mean time I'll look forward to ATT and the rest cringe as some real competition muscles in on the directory services businesses. But let me warn you - once Google and others have captured the market share they want expect some overt advertising thrown in with your number look up.