Not too long ago, services like GOOG-411, 118 118 and AQA used actual humans to answer questions with witty responses and encyclopedic knowledge. Today’s search engines could learn something.
  • Matengor@lemmy.mlEnglish
    20·
    9 months ago

    I didn’t even know about these services. It’s fascinating they were relevant for about ten years only. What a good read.

      • LifeInMultipleChoiceEnglish
        9·
        9 months ago

        I remember texting chacha if every rose has its thorn, to which they would respond that according to the 1988 song released by Poison, every rose does have its thorn.

        I can’t remember so many things from that part of my life, why that stuck, no idea.

          • LifeInMultipleChoiceEnglish
            3·
            9 months ago

            I wasn’t born till 89, so not my era either. But music comes from all eras. I think I spent half yesterday with Ain’t No Sunshine stuck in my head. That was 71? I think

              • LifeInMultipleChoiceEnglish
                21·
                9 months ago

                2 validations in a row. It’s 9:41am here. It’s going to be a good day. I hope you have a great one as well!

    • jeffwOPEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      I had heard of them but had no idea there were so many of them or that they were so successful

    • FredselfishEnglish
      6·
      9 months ago

      Wonder if there a way bring any of these types of services back and be affordable? Like the part of chatting with older people. There are lots of old people in this world who would love to have some to talk with.

      • erwan@lemmy.mlEnglish
        11·
        9 months ago

        GOOG-411 was created specifically for Google to gather voice samples, with different ages, accents, etc. to train voice recognition. It was never for the sake of providing a service.

        • FredselfishEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          Not talking about that one. The article mention multiple different types of platforms.

    • jeffwOPEnglish
      21·
      9 months ago

      Ask Jeeves wasn’t an actual person though

      • IphtashuFitzEnglish
        14·
        9 months ago

        Ask Jeeves was a “question answering service” back then. They had a staff of human editors who curated answers to popular questions. Nothing they answered back then was done via search.

        Source: I worked for a search engine startup in the 90’s that was acquired by Ask Jeeves when they realized they needed a true search technology since human editing wasn’t scalable.

    • Lmaydev@programming.devEnglish
      21·
      9 months ago

      We did this for a friend’s birthday at uni. There were about 20 of us. Great night haha

      I used to love texting these numbers when drunk.