Google Cuts The Cord On Its Free 411 Service

In April 2007, Google launched a feature that, for the time, was very nifty: a free, fully automated 411 service called Goog-411 that would accept verbal commands to look up business listings. Today, after over three years of dutifully doling out free information to millions of phones, Google is announcing that it will be shuttering the service on November 12.

As Google alludes to in its blog post, the 411 service didn't exist solely because Google wanted to help people out ?�it also gave Google a vast amount of voice data, allowing it to improve its speech recognition technology for the voice services that are now present throughout Android and on many other phones, including the iPhone, BlackBerry, Nokia S60, and Windows.

CANON MEMC ELECTRONIC MATERIALS MICROSOFT MILLICOM INTL CELLULAR