Voice-activated search: From ChaCha to Microsoft

Posted Mar 15th 2007 12:39PM by Melly Alazraki
Filed under: Consumer Experience, Competitive Strategy, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Amazon.com (AMZN)

Last year I received an email inviting me "to take part in a revolutionary new search engine." I was offered to be a guide at ChaCha, a new search engine that uses human guides to help users find what they want. Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos invested $6.5 million in ChaCha. Today, with 30,000 guides (I never signed up) and expecting 300,000 by June, the founder, Scott Jones, is taking ChaCha one step further -- his goal is to make ChaCha the search engine of choice for cell-phone users.

ChaCha will be available at a toll-free number, with easy searches handled by voice-recognition software and more complicated ones going to ChaCha guides. The guides will enter the results of their searches into a voice-recognition database for future users. While users wait for the guide, voice ads will be played. According to Jones, cell-phone providers will replace 411 services with ChaCha by 2010.

While Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) is the obvious name each time Internet search is mentioned, ChaCha may actually see competition from Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT). After a few days of rumors, Microsoft said it will buy Tellme Networks Inc., a provider of voice-enabled mobile search, directory assistance and computerized, speech-driven customer service hotlines.

Microsoft's plans for Tellme's technology are vast and not limited to mobile search but to applications for the home (operating the TV for example), car (getting directions for the nearest gas station) and Microsoft Office applications as well. If one day this technology works smoothly, Google and others would have some catching up to do.

I've always seen voice-activation as the natural progress of current technology and even wondered in the past if Microsoft wouldn't indeed be the one to bring it to successful fruition. Today, we are one step closer.

"Save."

"Publish."

Tags: amazon, amzn, chacha, goog, jeff bezos, JeffBezos, microsoft, msft, tellme, voice activation, voice-activated search, Voice-activatedSearch, VoiceActivation, yhoo

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

3-15-2007 @ 3:04PM

AR said...

Good that people are taking the long view here, but I strongly doubt anything of this sort will be widely used by 2010. For the next ten years -- or until the simple problem of the tiny mobile screen is *somehow* overcome -- people will search on their computers and call 411 on their phones. Maybe they'll call 1-800-free411 instead of dropping two dollars for each call, but the point is that only those interested in debugging this new technology (a tiny sliver of the target audience) will actually use it in the meantime.

3-21-2007 @ 4:16PM

The Finance Fanboy said...

I have to agree with AR on this one -- I can't imagine this having much impact on the status quo for the next five years or so. Fascinating though, I can't deny that.

The Finance Fanboy, http://www.newfinancedeals.com