Still Wondering Where You're Going? Just TellMe!

On the heals of Google's voice commanded 411 directory and location service , veteran cellular directory provider TellMe has made its service free and added a couple interesting twists.

As with the Google service, you can call 800-555-TELL and interact with a mechanized voice system, or you can use your cell phone text messaging service and send a request to 83556 (TELLM). But if you have the right cell phone (which I don't) you can download a program to your phone and enter your requests through it by talking rather than typing.

Since I wasn't able to download the program and try it out I'll leave that to one of you to let me know how it works. As for the text message service, it worked similarly to the Google service, but the voice operation was less (or maybe more) than Google's.

One of Google's continuing strengths is its spartan interface. Just that facts Ma'am. The voice system asks for your location and your request then spits back up to 8 responses. TellMe is much more conversational and only responds with the first match. I think this may be because TellMe is advertising-driven and if there's an advertiser that fits your criteria you will hear it first... but I may be wrong about that.

Either way, I like the Google interface better. But... TellMe does have a nice feature that not only sends the name, phone number, and location information to your cell phone, it also sends a map of the location. With Google's amazing mapping capabilities, I would expect this to be a feature also available from Google soon.