Here in the VUIDesign blog, we’ve covered more than a few free cell phone services that provide great value (particularly considering the cost), are very easy to use, convenient and flat out helpful.
Therefore I was very happy to see Mr. Pogue cover three of my favorites on his Personal Tech blog (the video is particularly interesting, you should give it a look). Most of them take advantage of speech recognition, but they all make a good job of taking the complexity away from the users - which I wish every service out there would strive for.
Here’s a quick summary of what each one does, but nothing compares with calling the real thing and taking it for a ride:
- Google’s Free 411 (1800-GOOG-411) - Free 411 service that allows you to find and connect with local businesses. Some of the extra cool features offered include the capability of saying “text message” to get a text message with the business details (name, address, phone, etc.), “map it” or a map showing its location, or simply stay silent and getting connected to that business. Only thing I wished they had is foreign languages of the same service (currently English only)
- ChaCha (1800-2CHACHA) - Free mobile answers service where you can just dial their number, ask any question in “conversational English” (as if you were doing a web search), and after a minute or so you receive the answer in the form of a text message. Part of the secret sauce of course is the fact that searches are actually performed by “guides” which get paid about $0.20 for each answer they provide.
- Jott (1866-JOTT-123) - Free voice to text service that basically allows you to convert your voice into all sorts of textual representations such as text messages, email, reminders, lists, etc. In particular, this service has become very popular amongst bloggers and twitters since it’s relatively easy to take this one step further and set it up in such a way that you can send the messages to web services that would publish them automatically to the web.
I would be interested in hearing your experience with these services as well as any others you might have found just as usable (and hopefully just as free)
