When Tellme was first acquired by Microsoft, I assigned the lowest Deal Score rating ever, to the deal. I thought it was a lot of money for speech recognition service.
Earlier this week (April 23, 2008), the subsidiary made news: a free, BlackBerry-based, speech-driven, GPS-enabled location-based search service. So think about all the keywords involved in this product – free, mobile, search, speech, GPS, location, advertising. Blows the mind, eh?
Users download a client which coordinates the GPS detail and the spoken search term, delivering both to the Tellme network which does the interpretation, delivering the search parameters to Microsoft Live search servers which deliver the results to the users' screen. With click to call options, your pizza order is only moments away from being taken by the closest pizzeria. These local search terms are not well addressed by the search engines. Would you do a search engine lookup for pizza?
I tried but got only the national chains listings. I suppose I'd have to do their outlet lookup service to find the closest one.
The thing that got my attention however, more than the functionality of the service, was that it was NOT on a Microsoft platform! Amazing. Microsoft delivers functionality on other platforms first. That's the news here. Good for Tellme. Maybe, we'll see some other announcements like this soon from Microsoft…
