When the circuits weren't busy, the system worked well, and the ads were never more than 15 seconds long. Unfortunately, of about 10 calls I made to Jingle, half reached a recording saying "all circuits are busy." (George Garrick, chief executive of Jingle, said the service, which has been "overwhelmed with calls," is expanding its system.) I also tried 1-800-FREE-411, provided by Jingle Networks of Boston. (The connection, incidentally, is free, which means that on some calling plans you can save money by letting 411-METRO put you through even if you already know the number.) I was then invited to press 1 to connect to the pizza restaurant, 3,000 miles away in San Francisco, or press 2 for the Brooklyn restaurant. I told her, and then heard another ad for Golden Gate Cuisine and Pizza-"extra large, three toppings only $15.95." "How do you spell the Thai?" she asked me. I asked her for the number of Rice Thai Kitchen, in Brooklyn. Protect your home or small-business PC from viruses and hackers." Then an operator picked up. But if time is money, I did pay a small price.įirst I heard, "This call is brought to you by Trend Micro. By contrast, when I called 800-411-METRO, operated by InFreeDA of Menlo Park, Calif., it cost me nothing. I normally pay $1.49 to call 411 from my Verizon Wireless phone (and 10 cents more if I request a backup text message). "The search result should not be driven by ad dollars alone." ![]() But "the listing always has to be relevant to the customer's request," said James Albert Smith, a spokesman for Verizon LiveSource. That would alter the nature of directory assistance. The restaurant would pay the company a fee. ![]() If you ask for the number of a restaurant, "you might get a menu or a $10-off coupon sent to your phone," Moran said of a possible future service. (LiveSource, owned by Verizon Communications, handles about 1 billion 411 calls a year for customers not only of Verizon Wireless, but of T-Mobile, Cingular and Alltel.) As cellular bandwidth increases, those offerings will go from voice to text to multimedia, said Tom Moran, executive director of product management and development for Verizon LiveSource. To keep users calling their paid 411 services, the major wireless carriers have added features like horoscopes, sports scores and stock prices. One contender, the Maestro system, a voice-activated search engine being developed at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, will allow users to surf the Web just by speaking and listening. Soon, voice-activated search engines may make it possible to bypass directory assistance entirely. Other companies, including Google, offer free directory assistance via text message. Already, two new services-800-FREE-411 and 800-411-METRO-offer directory assistance free of charge, though users have to listen to advertisements.
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