Dial Directions expanded its free, voice-activated `directions’ phone service to six metro areas, including Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Sacramento, San Diego and Washington, D.C. The service was already available in the San Francisco Bay area, and the greater metro areas of New York and Los Angeles.
On any cell phone, users simply dial "DIR-ECT-IONS" (347-328-4667), speak their starting location and destination (address / intersection, store or event), and the service instantly sends driving directions by text message.
"Whether you’re looking to get to an address, finding the nearest business chain, or attending a local event — it’s all just a simple, free call from any cell phone," said Amit Desai, cofounder and chief product officer of Dial Directions. "Consumers from all walks of life are giving Dial Directions rave reviews, because they find the service easy to use, accessible and free."
Dial Directions’ new `event’ feature lets any caller get directions to a local event from any starting point. Any organizer can have an event supported in Dial Directions simply by self-publishing the event location at www.dialdirections.com. After posting, organizers can tell their audience to get directions by dialing DIRECTIONS and saying the event name. In addition to directions, the service also provides event details, such as date and time.
Dial Direction’s new event feature gives power to event social networking by providing speech-enabled directions on any cell phone. Many event social networking tools offer the ability for event search and sharing, but all lack an easy mechanism for providing directions to the event.
"The addition of events to the Dial Directions service is both unique and valuable," said Greg Sterling, founder of Sterling Market Intelligence and analyst with Local Mobile Search. "It points the way to a broad new range of services that extend voice search well beyond the traditional directory assistance model."
The service is built on a ground-breaking technology platform developed by a team of industry experts in voice interfaces, speech recognition, and navigation – whose work is in use today by leading retailers, entertainment companies and airlines. This is the second wave of a broad set of location-based services (LBS) by voice activation to be made available by Dial Directions.
"One of our primary goals in starting this service was to make the emerging benefits of location-based services available to everyone. Before Dial DIR-ECT-IONS, you’d have to be in front a computer, own a `smart’ phone with Internet access and deal with complicated software downloads and applications that require a keyboard," said Desai. "Now anyone can turn their cell phone into a `free GPS’ by dialing and speaking."
Source: Dial Directions