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Google hanging up on GOOG-411
With so many people now using phones with sophisticated mobile Web browsers, Google has decided to stop supporting its first voice-to-text search service.
Google is shutting down GOOG-411, its first attempt to create a search-by-voice application.
The company announced in a blog post today that the service will end on November 12. First launched back in 2007, GOOG-411 allowed users to say the name of a business and have the service text you back a listing for that business with address and phone number.
Google has been doing a lot of work on speech recognition since then, and has separately begun to focus almost all of its mobile efforts on modern smartphones: GOOG-411 is kind of irrelevant if you have the Internet in your pocket.
Non-smartphone users will still be able to get information from Google by texting "GOOGLE (466453)."
