From WSJ: The 411 on Mobile Yellow Pages

Here's a article from the WSJ reviewing mobile 411 services (free and paid). According to the write-up, no one is attempting recommendations. Jingle (800Free411) reads the listing - they do not connect the caller. If the call is not connected, they can not analyze the connection rate in order to make recommendations. Thus the "cranky consumer" / Bad connections = bad experience.

CRANKY CONSUMER

The 411 on Mobile Yellow Pages
We Test Services That Search Business Listings
By SAMAR SRIVASTAVA, WSJ
August 2, 2007; Page D2

When you're out and about and suddenly find yourself in need of a pizza, a shoe-repair shop or an airline reservation, the Yellow Pages just won't do. They are heavy, for one thing, and don't fit easily into a shoulder bag.

. Pros, cons and pizza of five services. But finding a business on the fly is becoming much easier as a host of free phone-directory services have begun offering custom searches of their business listings.

Tellme Networks, a Microsoft Corp. subsidiary, this spring began offering a free version of its search services that gives cellphone and landline callers access to business listings and services far outside the traditional 411 realm, such as stock quotes and travel-related information. Google Inc. recently launched a test version for phone users of its online local business-search service.

The two new services join San Diego-based startup Jingle Networks Inc., which has been offering free government, residential and business listings since September 2005. Tellme and Google, by contrast, don't even offer residential listings.

To check whether the free services are as good as their paid counterparts -- and whether the hassle of listening to an advertisement is worth the free listing -- we tested them against the paid offerings from T-Mobile, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG, and Verizon Wireless, which is jointly owned by Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC. We searched for business listings and tested other options when available. As a baseline test, we searched for local pizza-restaurant listings across all five services.

For the most part, the free services have ditched live operators and are powered by speech-recognition software. This reduces the cost of providing the service to between eight and 10 cents per inquiry from about 25 cents. But we found that most speech-recognition systems can only understand words and phrases. Speaking a full sentence made the search go off course.

The tradeoff: Jingle requires its users to listen to a short advertisement before the listing is provided, and Tellme and Google are widely expected to follow suit.

With eight categories -- business listings, entertainment, travel, news and so on -- Tellme's product is the most extensive. Yet our search for a pizza place close to Church Street in lower Manhattan yielded options closer to Midtown. We were offered the chance to connect with the restaurants or have the address and phone number sent via text message.

Tellme's travel service was more helpful. As per our request, we were connected to the airline of our choice and to a taxi service in our area. Other categories also worked well -- we were able to get movie listings for our area as well as news headlines. The service also offers driving directions, but it had trouble understanding our starting and ending addresses.

By contrast, the speech recognition at Jingle Networks' FREE-411 worked almost perfectly, and the menus were simple and easy to navigate. In addition to business listings, the service offers government and residential listings. Here too, the pizza listing wasn't very accurate, and the options provided were a fair distance from our location. We were able to get a phone number for our local Social Security Administration office. When we asked for a residential listing, the computer couldn't understand the name we gave, and we were promptly connected to a live operator who took down our request. After a short ad, a computer read the phone number.

We found Google Voice Local Search the simplest to use. Upon giving your location and business category, the system spits out eight options. The results are the same as a Google local search on the Internet would provide. This service gave us the option of typing in our ZIP Code, making the results for the pizza listing much more accurate. Once again, we were given the option of connecting to the business or having the information sent via text message. Overall, Google's computers were able to understand what we wanted, and we ended up repeating ourselves only a couple of times.

The traditional paid 411 options left us disappointed. While they were easier to use, the operators seemed rushed. The $1.49 that Verizon and T-Mobile charge includes three searches, but after the first one, we had to keep asking the operators to stay on the line. Still, we were satisfied with the pizza listings, as they were close to our location. We were also able to get residential and business listings without a hitch. Verizon also offers a reverse directory search, in which you can supply a phone number to get a name and address.