Nuance Brings Yellow Pages to Phones

Speech and imaging solutions provider Nuance Communications is bringing business category search capabilities to Jingle Networks' free directory assistance service.

Nuance automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech applications have powered the traditional Jingle 411 service with its automated directory assistance solutions since the service launched in September 2005. The addition of the business category search service works on the same ad-supported model where the service is free to callers and gives targeted marketing offers before providing the category information that the caller requested.

The business listings are based on a database of 900 categories. Callers request the information by voice and the system responds in text-to-speech. The listings are initially searched by city and state, but can be narrowed further to street, neighborhood, landmark, or other location.

This enhancement to Jingle's previous offerings extends the 411 services from the white pages types of look up to the yellow pages offerings similar to those found in a phone book. "One of the distinctions usually drawn in the directory assistance industry is between white pages and yellow pages. This is an expansion into the idea of yellow pages in phone format. It is a search by category as opposed to by name," explains Mary Luvera, product manager of the Voice and Multimodal DA/EDA Search and Communications Division at Nuance. "It allows callers to have one phone number or forum to do both white pages and yellow pages searches."

"Adding category search capabilities improves the value of the free 411 Jingle Networks service by providing added flexibility to users," says Daniel Hong, lead analyst at Datamonitor. "No longer are users bound to traditional inputs, but now they are able to triangulate their search through inputting different variables.

"From an industry perspective, I believe this application serves as a precursor to the multimodal and mobile search applications that will come to market over the next several years, where users can input and receive information in a variety of ways, including voice, SMS, chat, email and video," he continues.