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Google voice 411 shuts down: Blessing in Disguise for Just Dial?
By siliconindia
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Tuesday, 12 October 2010, 03:02 IST |
1 Comments
Bangalore: The news of Google closing down its 1-800-GOOG-411 voice-powered directory search service from 12th November has provided an opportunity to alternative service providers like Just Dial to increase their customer base. The shutting of 1-800-GOOG-411, is blessing in disguise for these service providers who will compete to grab the market.
Almost, 80 percent of Americans do not own a smartphone and that paves the way for voice based offerings. With closure of this service, Just dial which launched its service in U.S. six months back gets the right boost for its voice based service. Moreover, Just dial provides human interaction as it's not the case either with the Bing-144 or the1-800-GOOG-411 as they depend on automated bots.
Just dial will end its fiscal year at the end of March with some $32 million in revenues having answered 72 million calls in the last year. That call volume is increasing by 40 percent, so the company expects to break 100 million calls in the next year. Therefore, there is no doubt that Just dial will increase its market fold many times. By 2009, Just Dial Group serviced over 30,000 US and Canadian subscribers.
Although, Google has never said how successful the service has proved, but it is expected that the company managed to get what it wanted from GOOG-411. Google had not launched the service for profit rather it was launched for research purposes. Google needed a large scale product to develop its voice recognition technologies and GOOG-411 was perfect for it.
During the three years, Google had made it clear that GOOG-411 was mainly a tool to collect 'utterances' and a foundation for other services. Google never tried to monetize GOOG-411, though it could have.
The service probably lost its demand, owing to several other competitive services (from Google itself) like Google mobile app or the ability to call businesses from Gmail itself; and lack of clear monetization strategy. A good alternative to GOOG-411 is BING-411 (1-800-BING-411), Microsoft's service that gives turn-by-turn driving directions, traffic conditions, and weather reports.
It needs to be seen, as to how these service providers will benefit from the closure of 1-800-GOOG-411 in coming days.
