Bing 411 Gives Turn-by-Turn Directions, Weather by Phone
Because it can’t bear not to take on Google in everything, Microsoft quietly launched a free Bing 411 phone service yesterday to complement its semi-new search engine. The good news is that Bing does offer two unique, helpful features.
Bing 411 (1-800-246-4411) and its obvious Google counterpart, GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411), both offer voice searching of businesses around a certain city or town, and both can connect your call or send you a text message with more details. In a half-dozen test calls, three on each service, I found that each phone directory could pick up both suburban chain stores and quirky local shops pretty quickly. Both had the unfortunate habit of giving into clever shop naming, so asking, for example, for “flower delivery” as a category instead brought up a listing for a local shop named “Fast Flower Delivery.” On the whole, their business-finding acumen was pretty equal. I’d split the two directory services by unique features—Google Maps integration on GOOG-411, and a clever option to name a street intersection you want to search near in Bing 411.
What Bing offers to set it apart are two features for users without data-connected smartphones. One is turn-by-turn directions from wherever you are, and you can even save a “home” and “work” location with the service to save time, entirely over the phone. It tells you what highways are involved at each step before rattling off the directions, and you can skip to any those highway steps if you kind of know where you are but just need a little off-ramp clarification. The weather service is fairly in-depth as well, providing to-the-minute temperatures and offering extended forecasts for where you are or where you’re going. You can get shorthand weather and turn-by-turn directions through Google’s free SMS service, of course, but Bing’s service lends itself to speakerphone listens and multi-tasking (hopefully not while driving).
So please excuse the tech news cynicism up top about the eternal Microsoft/Google struggle. Competition for features in free services like these is, on the whole, a pretty good thing.
