Today Baidu’s voice search formally launched, not available for registration though. This is not news if you are an old reader. We first reported it in last August. Now it seems Baidu finally made the decision on how to operate the service.
You will use the service in this way: Call 400-666-8585 with any phone, tell the staff what you are looking for, then the result will be sent to you with short message. There’s no big change in the process since last August.
The change is the service is not free anymore. You will have to deal with your own phone charge of course, which is just regular phone cost. Then Baidu is charging for RMB 1 per minute for the service and RMB 0.1 for the result short message afterwards. To use the service, users will have to fill their account with pre-paid cell phone cards, the same way they charge the cell phones.
Also in this month, QQ will start testing Voice mail service, cnBeta is reporting. This will be a new feature of QQ Yinxin, originally a text-to-speech service. Users just type the words, then receivers can listen to the message on phones. The service is not free either, charging RMB 1 per message. With the new feature, people on the other side can hear your own voice.
We haven’t tried either of the two services yet, especially QQ, which is not clearly documented. But we apparently can see that business focus on cell phone is still in its traditional feature: Voice. If you are considering a new cell phone for yourself, forget about smart phones.
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