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GOOG-411's "Biddy-Biddy-Boop" Sound Backstory

Posted by kdawson on from the party-to-whom-i'm-speaking dept.

Chris Albrecht writes "The bippedy-bippedy-bippedy sound you hear when using 1-800-GOOG-411 is actually a senior voice designer at Google. (Here's the sound.) The technical term for that noise is the 'fetch audio,' and it's more complicated to design than you'd think. For the first time, the voice of GOOG-411 talks about how he came up with it, how important that sound is, and how people now ask him to 'perform' it."

1 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. If you don't know what this is about by TorKlingberg · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you are also not American, or just haven't hear of it, Wikipedia article here:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411

    Basically, GOOG-411 is an experimental Google telephone service. Users can call and use speech regocnition to do local business search. I think American phones have letters on the number buttons, so 1-800-GOOG-411 means 1-800-466-4411.