This past week Google announced the upcoming demise (November 12) of their Goog411 service. Goog411 let you call an 800 number and ask for the phone number of a business. A disembodied voice from deep within Google would deliver the phone number or numbers if there were multiple businesses in that location and you could pick the one you wanted. All over a cell phone connection, any cell phone - no smart phone required. All for no charge. Pretty good deal considering the outrageous fees the cell phone carriers stick you with for their 411 service. It turns out that Goog411 was really a means for Google to collect voice samples of known lingo for the development of some of the fancy services being offered up through their Android OS on those cell phones.
Personally, while Goog411 could get the job done, I found it frustrating that it didn't have enough granularity in making a query. You could specify a business and the city and state. That was fine until you needed the number of a business that had multiple locations in town. The first time I tried it, I needed to call our pharmacy. That's when I found out how many "Walgreens" there were in town. Goog411 read them all off to me. And the alternative "Walgreens" that we sometimes used wasn't even on Goog411's list because technically they were just outside of our city limits and as far as Goog411 was concerned, they might as well have been on the other side of the state. And I sure didn't want to ask for a "Walgreens" in Oklahoma City - the cell phone would probably have died before that list was finished.
Instead, I have been using ChaCha as my alternative 411 service. Rather than being a machine driven system, ChaCha uses "real live human bein's" to answer questions you pose over the phone. Call ChaCha's 800 number (1-800-224-2242), dictate your question (note - this is not limited to directory assistance type questions!) and in a minute or two, you get a text message or messages with the answer. Since you can use ChaCha to ask any question, it can be kind of addicting. Make sure you have a good text message plan - you can get caught up playing "stump the chacha guy". A friend and I ended up playing that one night while partaking in adult beverages. I'll just say we ran out of beer before we got a bad answer.
I initially started using ChaCha two or three years ago when they were a start up. They were later bought out by AT&T, and AT&T has done some things that have not exactly improved the service. It seems like more of the "answers" are machine generated. It used to be they were dead on with an answer to your question. Case in point: I was supposed to meet someone for lunch at a restaurant that I could swear I knew the location of. Wrong. I got to the location of where I thought it was and discovered that I wasn't as smart as I thought. I calledChaCha on my cell phone in the car, asked "where is Casa Pereco Mexican restaurant on the north side of Oklahoma City and what are the nearest major cross streets?". A few minutes later I got a text message back with the address and the nearest intersection. I found I was off by about a mile.
Regardless, ChaCha offers some granularity that Goog411 did not have. For my Walgreens example, I could ask "what is the phone number of the Walgreens at 150th and North Western in Oklahoma City" and probably get the right answer without a lot of other alternatives to wade through.
So give it a try: 1-800-224-2242 (1-800-2chacha)
Oh yeah, and like Goog411 its free. And free is good.
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