ChaCha Now Answering 1M Questions Daily

ChaCha introduced a new Facebook app that submits questions to users' Facebook networks and to ChaCha simultaneously:

With ChaCha's Facebook App, when individuals pose a question to any friends within their social network, the question is also automatically submitted to ChaCha. ChaCha rapidly returns an answer from its huge database of hundreds of millions of answers. ChaCha will show up as another friend with an answer to the Facebook user along with answers from their network of friends. Users can also select "add to profile" to get a permanent "Ask ChaCha" prompt on their profile pages.

Additionally, Facebookers can select "share" when they submit a question, and the question and answers will post to their friends' Facebook walls. Individuals receive points for questions they answer for pure recognition and fun, and based on points attainment, users receive different titles which are displayed on a leader board.

It allows users to ask select members of their networks or the entire network. 

There are a few interesting things going on here in my mind:

• This turns ChaCha into a Yahoo Answers-like service on Facebook
• Facebook has this capability itself but it hasn't really developed fully on its own; this app (if successful) might further accelerate the creation of a Q&A culture on Facebook
• ChaCha makes money through mobile advertising and by showing ads on its PC website, so it is relatively "agnostic" about where questions come from 

Google just bought Aardvark for $50 million. ChaCha might be attractive to Microsoft or another potential buyer for similar reasons; however 90%+ of ChaCha's answers are coming via an index of previously answered questions for cost/efficiency reasons. That database will provide the answers for these questions rather than real-time human responses; Facebook provides the human answers in this case. 

The company also says it's answering a million questions a day. Though very impressive that's much smaller volume than a conventional search engine.

ChaCha has raised $52 million in several funding rounds.

Related: ChaCha Growing, Now It Needs More Advertisers

Update: CEO Scott Jones provided the following clarifications and addition information to me in email:

Yes, we are at a million answers a day… which is less than online search, but perhaps a better comparison is that we’re ahead of google’s mobile text answers service which has been out for a few years AND it is radically higher than aardvark’s daily answers (through both web and iphones).

In addition to facebookers answering questions, we also will continue to have guides answering questions. Both human/social ingredients are important to provide relevance (which google lacks), accuracy (which google also lacks, hence the million results dumped in your lap for you to figure it out), and speed (which aardvark lacks even when they sometimes do provide an answer).

kgb Shows Super Bowl Ads, ChaCha Tracks Favs

kgb offered a couple of commercials (that I saw) last night during the Super Bowl. I enjoyed the sumo wrestler spot especially and thought it was effective. Unlike many commercials broadcast during the game the humor and content of the spot was directly tied to the brand and the service.  

This morning ChaCha put out a release that found the Doritos commercials were the favorites of the teen and young adult ChaCha user base:

ChaCha, the service that allows users to go online, call or text questions on mobile phones and receive free answers within minutes, says that a poll of its users, primarily teens and young adults, who asked questions during the Super Bowl last night showed that their favorite commercials were for Doritos. The ones they disliked most were for Go Daddy and the one most talked about, as measured by text traffic, was Denny's, mostly asking where was the nearest location of the restaurant to collect their free meal on Tuesday. Inquiries about the teams involved also skyrocketed with 60,000 (about 10x the norm) asked throughout Super Bowl Sunday.

Here's the kgb "I Surrender" commercial. 

In general most of the commercials last night I thought were pretty weak. "Green police" (Audi) was another commercial I liked quite a bit. 

Aardvark: Mobile Users More Active

We've been writing about Aardvark since before its launch. I originally characterized it as an "answer community," but the company recently adopted the moniker "social search engine," which is a bit more familiar and something of an established "category" of search engines.

Last week Aardvark co-founder Damon Horowitz (one of the architects of its algorithm) and Sepandar Kamvar (who was behind Google's personalized search and now teaches at Stanford) wrote a research paper called “Anatomy of a Large Scale Social Search Engine." The document is something of an homage to an earlier paper written by then Stanford grad students Sergey Brin and Larry Page "Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine."

The paper goes into how queries are analyzed and routed among people and offers a great deal of interesting information and data that I won't summarize here. You can get the report and take a look if you're interested. What I'm going to highlight is the distribution of queries:

Source/image: Aardvark

A substantial portion of these fall into the traditional "local" (offline) categories as one might expect. But the range of queries is quite broad: people looking for advice and general information from "experts." Furthermore, here's what the paper says about mobile usage of Aardvark:

Mobile users had an average of 3.6322 sessions per month, which is surprising on two levels. First, mobile users of Aardvark are more active than desktop users. (As a point of comparison, on Google, desktop users are almost 3 times as active as mobile users.) Second, mobile users of Aardvark are almost as active in absolute terms as mobile users of Google (who have on average 5.68 mobile sessions per month). This is quite surprising for a service that has only been available for 6 months.

We believe this is for two reasons. First, browsing through traditional web search results on a phone is unwieldy. On a phone, it’s more useful to get a single short answer that’s crafted exactly to your query. Second, people are used to using natural language with phones, and so Aardvark’s query model feels natural in that context. These considerations (and early experiments) also suggest that Aardvark mobile users will be similarly active with voice-based search.

Mobile usage is more active than PC usage; this makes sense given the many information sources on the PC (alternatives to Aardvark), as well as the challenges of using conventional search on mobile devices (notwithstanding voice search). 

Aardvark, kgb and ChaCha exist along a continuum in a broadly similar category of peer-to-peer search -- a kind of DA 2.0. The three have different business models and different degrees of usage and penetration. Aardvark, similar to Siri, ultimately seeks to make money from affiliate referrals (but may develop a premium version for certain segments of users). ChaCha is entirely ad supported; kgb uses a more traditional per query consumer-pays model.

Free 411 Offers iPhone, Android Apps

Free DA provider Jingle Networks (800-Free-411) has launched iPhone and Android apps. They're generally useful and visually appealing but otherwise unremarkable, directory style apps. The noteworthy thing is that the company is seeking to grow volume and extend the brand through these apps. It also offers additional advertising opportunities for Jingle in mobile. 

Jingle says that it does about 15 million calls per month or 180 million per year, compared with billions of calls annually in the US directory assistance market. Jingle is arguably the best known of the "free DA" providers, followed by Google's Goog 411 service. The most complete is Bing 411, powered by Tellme.

Somewhat strangely, the public has not raced to adopt these services as once was expected (despite the money savings they offer). Lack of awareness is one factor, as is "inertia" around the number 411. Yet traditional directory assistance volumes also are in significant decline in the US. The decline of landlines and the rise of smartphones are likely also directly affecting traditional DA. Smartphones in particular make content and information available to users that far exceeds what is typically offered on a DA call.

kgb, which operates a "wholesale DA" business as well as a consumer-facing information services in the US and Europe, has reacted to the market with clever "reinventions" of the traditional offering on the iPhone (kgb answers and Knowtopia), which adds a game-like dimension to the service. The company is also doing Super Bowl advertising in an effort to further build awareness. 

kgb Expands its Mobile Footprint: Adds RIM Phones and New Entertainment App for iPhone

Text answer provider kgb continues to broaden the depth and breadth of its service offerings by expanding its roster of supported phones to include popular RIM-branded smartphones while, at the same time, delivering a new "entertainment" app, called Knowtopia, to iPhone owners. Today its flagship, premium application - kgb Answers - is available to owners of the Blackberry Curve 8300 series™, Curve 8900™, World Phone 8800 series™, Bold 9000™, 9600 Tour™, and the Storm 9500 series™.

As we noted here, the app launched for iPhonea and Android-based devices in October. It marked a radical "revisioning" of the text-answering procedure, making it visually interesting and more entertaining. With Knowtopia, kgb takes the entertainment aspects of the answer business to the next level, transforming it into a never-ending mobile trivia contest. This is an organic extension of kgb's core resource, the network of "special agents" and the database of knowledge (both questions and answers) that they have compiled over the past year of operation.

Knowtopia seems like an ideal "time sink", akin to Twittering, but more conducive to face-to-face interaction. The application intersperses poll questions with trivia questions to promote interactivity. It also acts as a portal into the kgbkgb SMS text-based answers sevice reached through the 542542 short code. Thus, the new application extends the kgb franchise into the entertainment realm in a way that is tightly linked to the company strategy of delivering content on a pay-per-query basis. 

Vlingo Top Search Terms/Categories of 2009

Vlingo released what it calls the top 10 voice-powered mobile Web searches of 2009:

1. YouTube
2. Facebook
3. MySpace
4. Weather
5. Movie Times
6. Twitter
7. Yellow Pages
8. MapQuest
9. craigslist
10. White Pages

On first glance, this list is considerably different than Nielsen's top mobile sites of 2009:

1. Google Search
2. Yahoo! Mail
3. Gmail
4. Weather Channel
5. Facebook
6. MSN Hotmail
7. Google Maps
8. ESPN
9. AOL Email
10. CNN News 

Here's Yahoo's top PC search queries list of 2009:

1. Michael Jackson
2. Twilight
3. WWE
4. Megan Fox
5. Britney Spears
6. Naruto
7. American Idol
8. Kim Kardashian
9. NASCAR
10. Runescape

Here's Google's main list:

1. michael jackson
2. facebook
3. tuenti
4. twitter
5. sanalika
6. new moon
7. lady gaga
8. windows 7
9. dantri.com.vn
10. torpedo gratis

As TechCrunch correctly points out the Vlingo list is "action oriented" -- people trying to accomplish some objective out in the world or on the go.

As we long ago discovered people calling directory assistance (the earliest form of "voice search") were usually “in the car" (where other search methods are more difficult). DA callers also emerge as “qualified” sales prospects typically on their way to potentially conduct a transaction in a store or other offline business.

The presence of YouTube on the top of the Vlingo list is curious, although smartphone users consume a great deal of mobile video. The presence of social networks however is consistent with broader mobile Internet trends.

The Vlingo search query results above are coming, of course, via Google or Yahoo search. So in that larger context, there's general consistency between the Vlingo and Nielsen lists above. However, I wonder if the "yellow pages" and "white pages" queries are not "yellowpages.com" or "whitepage.com" but stand-ins for a broader range of local and business or people searches.

My belief is that while mobile search queries will skew local in the near term they'll be generally comparable with PC search queries over time. 

WhitePages.com Now on Android Devices

WhitePages.com follows up its popular iPhone app with a full-featured one for Android devices. This follows the company's successful launch of Caller ID as a stand alone Android application (paid app). The Android app largely mirrors the iPhone app and features:

• People Search
• Business Search
• Reverse Phone Lookup
• Add to Contacts
• A free seven day trial of Caller ID (not on the iPhone). After that it costs roughly $14 per year.

Here's a video demo and tour of the Android app's features:

WhitePages.com is hugely successful, if seldom discussed, online, with roughly 19 million monthly users in the US. 

Free DA: the Market That Never Was

It's a mystery in a way that the free DA market simply hasn't materialized as we at one time expected. Logically it should have because these services represent a mass-market form of local mobile search and a seemingly perfect ad platform. But just as PPCall never really developed online (though now there's movement again) the free DA market is weak at best and already stroon with failures.

I was struck by a column from TMPDM's Gregg Stewart in which he exposed some directory assistance calling data (derived from the company's annual study with comScore on the local market). The data were collected in July (US Internet users, n=4,000). Stewart said the survey showed "23 percent of mobile users access directory assistance as part of their local search process." 

In our ealier research the data reflect that 20% of mobile users called DA, so largely consistent (with a smaller sample). In April, we found that the majority of mobile DA users (61%) call DA/411 "a few times a year."

In an 2007 survey Opus conducted, the percentage was basically the same: 61% called DA from a mobile phone "once every three months." Thus, for most, DA calling is relatively infrequent and that's not likely to change. If anything usage and DA calling frequency should decline as voice search and mobile Internet access grow. 

Here's what TMPDM and comScore found in July, 2009 about the distribution of calls from that 23% of the survey respondents who called DA from a mobile phone:

Source: TMPDM-comScore (July, 2009)

Below is the distribution from our most recent survey; note that traditional 411 is not a choice, so it's likley represented in "another 411 service" or "none of these." 

Source: Opus Research/Internet2Go (April, 2009) 

In both charts I don't believe that people are calling "800-Yellowpages" as much as they report. I think they're responding to what seems like a familiar brand. And many of the services (e.g., 411-Metro) in the comScore chart are now defunct. 

The free, ad-supported DA market at one time seemed very logical and held great promise. I had called it "local-mobile search for the rest of us." But the "rest of us" are buying smartphones, which largely emerge as a replacement for such services. Plus the per-use charge of conventional DA is an inhibitor for many, though not all, people. 

Anecdotally marketers I've spoken to have reported good ROI from use of 800-Free-411 but the volumes for any given category and city are low so it can only be seen as a supplement to other digital or mobile marketing efforts. 

In general the carriers seem to be neglecting their services:

• 800-Yellowpages (AT&T)
• 800-THE-INFO (Verizon) 

And the search engines (Google, Bing) are maintaining their services but not promoting or continuing to develop them. There is a significant role for "voice search" to play in the mobile world but it doesn't appear the primary locus of activity will be free DA services.

Free 411 Uses Contest to Boost Call Volumes

Free, ad-supported directory assistance has gone from the hypothetical growth engine for mobile ad revenue in some analysts' forecasts to a marginal segment in the mobile ecosystem. The largest and most visible provider historically has been Jingle Networks' 1-800-Free-411. However I suspect that call volume growth has stalled there.

That's what I surmise is behind a new contest to attract usage:

The nation’s leading provider of free directory assistance, 1-800-FREE411, announced today the launch of a “30 Days of FREE411” sweepstakes. Beginning November 1, 2009, every person who requests a phone number from 1-800-FREE411 has a chance to win $411 on the spot, with two randomly selected callers awarded the cash prize daily. In addition, every caller in November will be entered into a drawing for a chance to win a trip to Boston and a shot at the grand prize of $411,000.

At the beginning of December, one lucky caller will win an all-expense trip to Boston for two. During their two nights in Boston, the winner will play a game where they choose one cell phone from 411 available phones. Each phone is awarded a value and the winner will walk away with a minimum cash prize of $4,100, with one of the 411 phones valued at $411,000!

The major carriers initially announced free, ad-supported initiatives (i.e., Verizon, AT&T) but they've been neglected because ad-supported DA hasn't taken off and their traditional paid businesses are cash cows -- though with declining volumes. 

The chart below reflects that despite having access to the Internet on a mobile device, a large number of people see 411 as a resource they'll continue to use. However smartphone users tended to agree with the statement in larger numbers. 

AdMob's September Metrics: Android Rising

AdMob's latest monthly metrics report shows that Android-based handsets are growing as a percentage of overall requests. This month's report also shows the rise and fall of various handsets over a period of nearly three years. AdMob also takes pains to counter criticism it has received by being very explicit about what its data do and do not reflect:

The report is based on the ad requests we receive from our network of more than 15,000 mobile Web sites and iPhone and Android applications. The data contained in the report is a measure of mobile data usage and does not represent the traditional view of market share based on the number of handsets sold.

And now for the data:

• In September 2009, the list of the top 10 devices in the US included five with touchscreens, six with Wi-Fi capabilities, and six with application stores.  These devices are responsible for a much higher percentage of mobile usage than their share of handsets sold.
• In September 2009 42% of requests in the US were made from Wi-Fi capable devices. 18% of actual US requests were made over a Wi-Fi connection in September 2009 compared to only 5% in September 2008.
• Devices running on Android accounted for 17% of smartphone traffic in the US in September 2009, up from 13% in August 2009. The HTC Dream (G1) was the number three device and the
• HTC Magic was the number 10 device in September 2009 in the US. As with the iPhone OS, much of the Android traffic in AdMob’s network came from applications.

The following tables reflect handsets responsible for mobile Web and app views on the AdMob network (US and UK). Note the shifts from 2007 to 2009: The rise of Apple, HTC, RIM and Samsung in the UK; and the fall of Motorola (and to some degree RIM) in the US. 

The following compares US smartphone OS share on AdMob's network in Decemberr 2008 vs. September 2009 (bottom):

• iPhone -- 2008: 48%, 2009: 48%
• Android -- 2008: 2%, 2009: 17%
• Windows Mobile -- 2008: 15%, 2009: 5%
• RIM -- 2008: 18%. 2009: 14% 
• Symbian: 2008: 2%, 2009: gone
• Palm/WebOS: 2008: 9%, 2009: 10%

None of these are market share numbers per se, as AdMob is now careful to point out. But they do reflect directional trends in the broader market.

New Apps Add Engaging "Gaming" Element to kgb Answers Service

Text answers service kgb this morning announced the release of an app for the iPhone and Android platforms. The app on either platform costs $1.99 and offers three free answers. After that the cost is $0.99 per question.

The competitive positioning of kgb Answers emphasizes the fact that there are "special agents" (humans, often college students) behind the scenes who can provide a more direct and efficient response to a question on the go vs. conventional search, which requires sifting through links on the small screen.

Previously the kgb service was only available via SMS at kgbkgb (542542). However the new iPhone and Android apps entirely change the nature of the experience and even turn it into something of a game in certain respects. I haven't yet downloaded the Android version, but I spent some time yesterday with the iPhone version.

I was impressed by the creative "reimagining" of the kgb service and the way the additional features and content expand it significantly. Here are some screenshots that offer a sense of the iPhone version of the app:

The app's home screen allows users to flip through a broad range of previously asked questions, mirroring the Q&A "scroll" on the company's site. If you want to find out the answer to one of these questions, you can submit the question and get the answer free of charge. Some example questions from just a few minutes ago include:

• What bird can fly 11,000 miles in about 90 days?
• What is the tallest mountain in the USA?
• What two unrelated countries have the same flag?
• What land animal stays pregnant for nearly 22 months?

The app also gives users the ability to explore related questions and answers free of charge. For example, one of the free questions I submitted was "What is the infamous first word of the movie Citizen Kane? (Answer: Rosebud). The answer page provides a list of several related Citizen Kane questions and answers that users can browse for free.

All of this free content creates a kind of trivia-game experience (in many contexts), which is a way of getting users engaged and to recognize the value of the service. In addition the app takes advantage of integration with the iPhone. Accordingly, if there's an address in a response or answer the app provides a map. Answers can also be shared via email or Facebook and are saved and can be searched or starred as favorites for later access.

All these features make the kgb app much broader and more useful than the traditional SMS version of the service. 

Arguably the only direct competitor to the core kgb Answers service is free, ad-supported ChaCha, which does not have an iPhone app at this point but provides the ability to call a phone number and speak queries instead of typing them. There are a range of other, somewhat more indirect competitors the closest of which is probably Aardvark, which relies on a network of peers to answer questions. There's also Yahoo! Answers (and similar Q&A services). Of course Google and other traditional search engines are competition as well. However, as I suggested above it's often frustrating to click back and forth through a bunch of links on the small screen. Google in mobile is fast but often paradoxically inefficient.

Because kgb Answers is a premium service and consumers pay per use, the company doesn't have to worry about advertising coverage or clicks (though one might imagine selective advertising at some point). However it does have to demonstrate enough value to convince users to keep paying. Generally that means it must deliver better answers than can the other free services or Google. Yet the iPhone App also changes the nature of the kgb service into something more engaging and entertaining than a straightforward Q&A service.

We understand that kgb has some other interesting apps in the pipeline as well. The company also operates the 118 118 and 118 218 telephone-based services in the UK and France. 

Aardvark Now a 'Social Search Engine'

Aardvark has relaunched its site and rebranded to a degree as a "social search engine." The site is sexier but the service is the same. I've also written about this at Search Engine Land.  One can now access Aardvark via Vark.com, Twitter, IM and the iPhone. 

Aardvark competes with a range of companies, but most directly with companies such as ChaCha, kgb and of course Google, because of its ubiquity. My guess is that Aardvark would see itself as a unique company in many respects but in the context of "human powered search" it has a number of other firms to contend with. The challenge for everyone in this space is how to differentiate from Google and establish a service that is more:

• Useful
• Trusted
• Efficient/Responsive/Specific
• Fun

Siri is coming soon too; it's not human-powered but will also be potentially competitive with Aardvark, kgb, et al. Here are our previous articles about Aardvark:

• Aardvark Launches an iPhone App
• Aardvark Taps Twitter as Another Entry Point 
• Aardvark Launches: Social Search, Social DA, Answer Community

New TMP-comScore Survey Data on Local Mobile Search

For the past three years ad agency/CMR TMP Directional Marketing (and now its search agency 15 Miles) have been studying local search behavior, using comScore's panel. During the past two years there's been a local-mobile component to the survey (n=4,000 US respondents). The chart below shows use of mobile devices to find local information (directory assistance is one of the choices): 

What the data reflect is that among these respondents 60% of smartphone owners have conducted a local search through an app or browser, while only 19% of non-smartrphone owners have. This goes to data pricing and cost factors as well as usability.

One interesting fact: smartphone owners (in this survey) don't seem to be substituting the mobile Internet for directory assistance usage. That may be because they tend to be more affluent and less price sensitive. But compare that with the attitudes shown in our April, 2009 survey (second graphic below) about the relationship between traditional DA and the mobile Internet.

Source: comScore-TMPDM/15 Miles (10/09)

By contrast, we found that smartphone owners and those intending to buy smartphones were in general agreement with the statement that the mobile Internet was a substitute for traditional 411:

“Now that I can get the Internet  on my mobile phone I no longer need  to call 411”

Source: Opus Research April, 2009 (n=707 North American mobile users)

Aardvark Launches an iPhone App

Aardvark, which is now describing itself as “social search engine" is really more like an "answer community." Regardless of the label the company uses to describe itself it has launched an app for the iPhone. I've written about Aardvark several times in the past and wrote up today's announcement at Search Engine Land. 

This may turn out to be the turning point for the company (like Pandora or Urbanspoon's iPhone apps). We'll see. But that's my intuition. 

The thing that struck me as I spoke to co-founder and former Googler Max Ventilla is that with the arrival of the iPhone app people will start to "get" what Aardvark is all about and see use cases more clearly: word of mouth on the go. People have been able to get to Aardvark via mobile but not in a simple way (SMS is still a way off). But it's a broader service that isn't simply about "need it now" recommendations. I can ask where to go on my 10 wedding anniversary or who won the 1957 world series or what's the best pinot noir for under $20. 

The services that it most directly competes against are ChaCha and kgb. The difference is that Aardvark is trying to build a community of user contacts to respond to queries vs using professional or semi-professional agents. And building that community is where the challenge resides. 

To that end Aardvark leverages both Facebook (and Facebook Connect) and Twitter as "entry points." If Aardvark can gain traction in mobile it can build momentum toward faster and more comprehensive answers, which right now take from about 2-5 minutes to receive. But the quality of responses has been good so far for me. 

The PC-mobile integration will also benefit loyalty and engagement. 

I asked Ventilla about speech and voice interfaces. He said they had built one but that alpha testers were not ready for the additional "complexity" it apparently introduced. Ventilla isn't abandoning speech, he's just defferring it. He also told  me that, like speech, there are many more enhancements coming in future versions of the app.

Aisle411: (Really) Local-Mobile Search

There are various forms of in-store marketing: coupons on shelves, end caps, on floor, in-store video, POS screens and so on. But here's something really valuable and fresh: Aisle411. We discovered it through the Voxeo blog.

The company works with retailers (big boxes) to help consumers locate products on store shelves -- within the store. I don't have a dollar figure but I know from personal experience that this is a problem: consumer wants to buy something but can't find it on the shelf. The salesperson is either ignorant, not available or otherwise unmotivated and so the consumer winds up frustrated ("I guess it's not here"). How many sales are lost because somebody can't find the item they're seeking and give up? 

Consumers are prompted to call 1-877-AISLE411 by an in-store display. They're taken through a DA-like menu (store, city, item) and ultimately directed to the aisle where the item is normally stocked ("sippy cups are in aisle three"). The system also gives stores the opportunity to promote other items (upsell related items) and specials of one sort or another. 

It's pretty interesting. Here's a quick demo with call flow. 

kgb Piggybacking on US Open (Tennis) for PR

SMS-based mobile search/answers provider kgb is using the occasion of the US Open tennis championship to promote its service:

The. U.S. Open begins Aug. 31, and kgb is on top of its game to answer all your tennis-related questions. Below are some actual U.S. Open questions that have been served up to kgb's 542542 text answer service.

Who has the most U.S. Open men's singles titles? How can I purchase tickets for this year's U.S. Open? Who is the youngest U.S. Open women's singles champ? Who are the top seeds at this year's U.S. Open? When was Roger Federer born?

Mobile answers service ChaCha is most similar to the kgb offering; however, the crowdsourced Aardvark is in the same segment as well. All these services co-exist and compete with conventional search on mobile handsets. The chief difference is that kgb is a premium service that doesn't feature ads (at the present time), while ChaCha is free to users but has advertising. 

Voice Search Better than Its Press

The SpeechTEK conference in New York just concluded and I was not there. Dan Miller, however, attended and I'm sure will have some interesting thoughts and reflections. However Internet News covered a mobile voice search panel at the show. From the discussion in the article it sounds like the panelists were more bearish on the state of voice search than they need to be: 

While many see opportunities, they also see barriers, panelists said. Services are restricted by factors as various as noise conditions and the need to limit the vocabulary size of recognition engines, which are also known as recognizers, said moderator Michael Cohen, manager of Google's speech technology group. 

When we visited Siri last week we had an extensive discussion about the state of speech recognition and the consensus in the room was that the industry had crossed a line and that voice was now pretty effective and reliable. I agree that things are now to the point where more mobile users will adopt voice as a regular or semi-regular interface and input mechanism -- as they become aware of it. 

I've used most of the commercial systems available to mobile users and find them, to varying degrees, to be fairly accurate. Sure, they're imperfect. Sure background noise interferes sometimes. But they work pretty well. This has been my experience with Tellme and with Google voice search on the iPhone and with Android. (I haven't used Vlingo enough to say.) I especially like the voice capability with Google Maps on Android. I also haven't been a regular user of Nuance products/tools, although Dan Miller has. 

So I'm more bullish on voice than the guys working on it appear to be. However, I don't see it as some sort of mobile search panacea or substitute for other tools in all cases; it will coexist with predictive text, the camera and other interfaces or input methods.

WhitePages Takes Aim at 411

Recently WhitePages.com has aggressively gone after print white pages with its "Ban the Phone Book" site and environmental arguments against print. Now it's making arguments against traditional directory assistance:

In Canada, directory assistance costs consumers and businesses an estimated $252 million and in the US, it's as high as $6 billion a year. The cost has dramatically escalated over the past decade with the increase of cell phone usage. The average directory assistance expense for cell phones is around $2.00 (CAN) and $1.67 (US) per call. Traditional landline directory assistance is slightly lower but still between $.95 and $1.50 (CAN) and an average $1.26 (US) per call. 

Our previous research has indicated varying levels of awareness and cost sensititivity to DA pricing. But the fact is that most mobile phone users don't call DA because they're generally aware that it costs money. In our most recent consumer survey (n=707, 4/09) we found that only 20% of respondents said they called 411 from their mobile phones. Of that 20%, just under 90% (86%) said they only called "a few times a year."

Separately we asked mobile users whether they agreed with the statement, “Now that I can get the Internet on my mobile phone I no longer need to call 411." A majority of smartphone users (58%) and those intending to buy smartphones said yes, while a majority of non-smartphone owners (68%) said no. This makes obvious sense. 

It's also pretty obvious that traditional DA call volumes are declining because of Internet competition, which is also increasingly true in mobile. Somewhat paradoxically we can thus expect more price increases from carriers seeking to milk remaining DA revenues from unsuspecting consumers, while driving the aware and price sensitive out to alternatives. 

What's curious however is that the free DA sector has really failed to materize in any significant way as a 411 alternative. Consumers remain largely ignorant of free 411 alternatives and companies are reluctant to spend money to market the services.