I used to use GOOG-411 all the time before I had a smart phone. I must have provided so much training data that it is no surprise Google from early on has been very good at Speech-to-Text conversion of my particular accent :D

GOOG411 was actually very helpful in the dumbphone/limited-cell-data era! I'm not sure why I'd use this now.

It also brings back memories of trying random (and known) 800 numbers from payphones.

I spent so much time as a kid in front of a payphone dialing 1-800-XXX-9999 numbers. That and wardialing (NPA) XXX-9999 numbers in my area code.

I'm also reminded of TellMe. [0]

In the days before we had pocket supercomputers, I used both of these services occasionally while out and about.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tellme_Networks

I don't think it's the same purpose. YouTube, TV and Movies offers enough speech samples and a lot of content is dubbed to other languages, and alot of this content already has the transcripts available.

They know who's calling, and the greeting was something like "Hello again". They are catching up at building a competitive database of persons and their preferences at the scale of FAANG. They're moving over from collecting info for their models to collecting info from their users for their agents. This is what they need to offer good agents.

But I might be wrong and it's just phoneme collection, as you speculate.

Regular human conversational voice, especially over the phone, is going to be a gold mine for training customer support AI agents. Actors reading movie scripts can't really provide that amount of relevance.

“This call is being recorded for quality and training purposes” truly has a new meaning.

Wow... I never thought of this.

Agreed on the broader use of data. That said, it’s not just about phoneme collection—different channels and UX modalities reach different audiences and contexts. Each channel ultimately delivers unique inputs, fueling more specialized and robust models tailored to those specific use cases.

The best part of GOOG411 was that they would connect you to the phone number, free of charge, across borders.

List a business with a Google voice number and you can call in, check messages, and _dial out_ from Google voice. Free international calls!

I was in school in Canada where we had a payphone in a hallway. People heard me randomly saying "Funny Business Name, City State ... Connect me" into the phone so much, it became a running joke.

When I eventually got my own phone, I transferred the number and I still have it.

Does anyone else remember a very short lived Google experiment that allowed you to call a number, vocalize your search, and somehow without any additional steps, the results appeared on the browser in front of you? (which was not connected to the phone, or even logged into a Google account)

Sounds impossible. Are you calling on the same phone your browser is?

It might be possible if the browser plays some high frequency inaudible tone that's picked up by the phone

> which was not connected to the phone, or even logged into a Google account

Yes! Instant memories

woo, that's a throwback!

Goodbye to an old friend: 1-800-GOOG-411 (2010)

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/goodbye-to-old-frien...

Must have been tough thinking of an easy to remember phone number, and this ain’t it.

It made more sense at the time. 411 is an actual directory service (similar to dialing 0 for the operator). [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/411_(telephone_number)

N11 codes are a particular curiosity of the electromechanical switching systems used to set up circuits: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N11_code

What's the haps? What's the skinney? What's the 411?

3 questions that Gen-Zers probably have never heard asked and will never ask themselves

Sweet little duckling. Before the Internet you had to call a human on a phone to find phone numbers. 411 was a widely known number, similar to how widely known 911 is today.