• Fredselfish@lemmy.world
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      4 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.ml
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        4 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.

      • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world
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        4 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.