Dial Directions (347-328-4667) is a free voice-activated service that provides
driving directions to all cell phone users. I recently reviewed this service
www.dialdirections.com and here is what I found:
What is everyone raving about here? I just called and had a horrible
experience. Yes the prompts are a little poor (too many explicit
confirmations, error messages repetitious, etc.), but I had an
extremely bad speech recog experience as well. It didn’t recognize me in
several circumstances and the error handling didn’t make it any
better. I like the idea, but this isn’t even ready for Beta.
Once I knew ahead of time the cities allowed and was able to access
the menu for address|intersection|business the first time, it went
*okay*. On my first call, it seemed after having several recognition
problems including not recognizing my “yes” for instructions twice,
the problems just got worse. Later it didn’t ask me beforehand if I
was going to say an address or not and it never recognized a street
name in the “address” section that it did in the second call
under “intersection”. Their ability to recognize in each area is not
uniform and therefore inconsistent and confusing to the user. I just
figured they didn’t have that street name covered yet when as it
turned out, they did. The error catching experience is unhelpful as
you can see.
I also don’t like that it hangs up immediately after finding
directions for you instead of giving you the option to find a second
location. There’s a problem with their content delivery too -
they should parse the map output better (a constant problem
since I myself started working on driving directions in the 90’s) and
when I asked for Taco Bell locations, I got several listed as 4 miles
away and the descriptions provided weren’t enough to distinguish
them, so they need better delivery there. Of course the dynamic
output is poor, from city names to street names, but they could do
some post processing on that.
–Simonie
