What's the 411?

Goog411 launched a little bit ago. Interestingly, this one is labeled "experimental", not "beta" as per Google's usual release.

Cell phone companies (and land line for that matter) charge a lot when you call Information - from 50 cents to over $3 -- PER CALL. There have been alternatives for a while, (have you tried 800-Free-411 or Tell Me (800-555-Tell) Business Search yet?) Google has had an SMS service you can use from your phone for residential and business listings for a while too. That saved me a lot of time and energy on our last trip to Florida!

Anyway, back to Goog411. Besides it's cheesy name, I was also disappointed by the service itself, sadly. Having used TellMe for quite a while, I became quite used to superior voice recognition, natural sounding responses and even natural conversation. While the Goog411 service did find the businesses I was looking for (with the exception of the "I'm sorry. You seem to have encountered a minor bug in our system. We'll get someone working on a fix for that right away" and the multiple attempts that just plain went unanswered - the system never even picked up, thought eh call had connected.) The response is very robotic sounding too.

I understand that this is still bet..., er um, "experimental," but I think that this one is a little to early to release even for Google.