Google 411 at SpeechTEK

At the SpeechTEK conference this morning, Mike Cohen, Manager of the Speech Technology Group at Google talked about GOOG411, the free directory assistance service they have been operating.  While he refused to say anything about what was coming in the future, he did provide a few useful tidbits about Google's approach to speech applications.  They see mobile devices and speech as an important mechanism for providing access to data and are building speech into Gogle's core infrastructure.

One of the more interesting parts of Mike's talk was about how they measure usability and go about refining the system.  One of the measures of "user happiness" they used was the percentage of calls that the caller allowed Google to transfer after receiving the initial information.  They did A/B comparisons on new features, such as offering to connect the first match before listing the rest of the results.  They found that this increased the transfer rate by 1.5%.  In order to verify that this was really the result of happiness and not just passive acceptance of the transfer, they did interviews with 34 subjects.  They did verify that people realy did find the feature useful, but also found that many people using the service didn't want to actually make a call but just wanted to get the information.

I learned about one useful feature, which is that in addition to saying "SMS" to get the results sent to my phone, I can say "Map It" to get a map of the results.  Pretty cool!

Comments

[Paul]

I'm not sure how true this is, could be just a rumor, but I've heard that Google is recording all these Goog-411 calls in order to work on its voice technology. Makes sense, but there are some serious privacy considerations here if it's true. And if it is true, they have an obligation to say so publicly so that callers who want to keep their inquiries private can call 1-800-free411 or other free d.a. providers who most certainly would not record any calls.

[Christopher Herot]

They did say they recorded some calls, but those were for a small number of people who agreed to participate in a study. Of course they do have a lot of disk drives.