This is amazing. Feels similar to college radio: still more incredible than it should be for a "dying" medium.
An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
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Re: An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
#62I feel like a lot of schools had this kind of number to ask questions, including my undergrad. Though I don’t think they go back 70 years.
A popular question was “how many severed heads can fit into our stadium” and a couple of kids reasoned it out.
Re: An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
#63800-GOOG-411 was planned to do a similar thing; the difference is that was online for 3 years and unceremoniously shut down, versus this one which is still in operation 72 years later.
It would be somewhat niche, but if you have an iPhone and somehow wanted the Hey Google reaction instead of Siri, could still find use as a hands-free information source.
Re: An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
#64Re: An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
#65Re: An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
#66What a fun surprise to see this on HN! I had the opportunity to work the Foy Desk a few times during my undergrad at Auburn in the early 2000s - mostly as a volunteer while the regular workers would be in meetings. At the time we had a multi-page list of common questions and answers, the Internet (as it was then), as well as access to university computer systems for things like class schedule lookups. The most common…
War damn!
Talking about being lost in the Haley center gave me flashbacks to freshman year. I still have dreams sometimes of trying to find the stairwell/elevator bank and the layout keeps changing like the backrooms.
Re: An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
#67800-GOOG-411 was planned to do a similar thing; the difference is that was online for 3 years and unceremoniously shut down, versus this one which is still in operation 72 years later.
It's pretty well understood (and was at the time) that the project was aimed at collecting voice sample data for further voice-recognition and AI work:
"Google Shuts Down GOOG-411" (October 9, 2010)
The service has helped Google build a large database of voice samples and improved the voice recognition technology. Here's what Google's Marissa Mayer said about GOOG-411:
"The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. ... So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we're trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy."
https://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/10/google-shuts-down-...>
""The 411 Parable": Make sure you are playing the same game." (2011)
But just when the "head-to-head" competition was rolling Google announced GOOG-411 was no more... they'd captured all the human speech they needed to train their algorithms and were on to bigger and better things... Huh, voice recognition... algorithms?
https://web.archive.org/web/20130810032940/http://buildconte...>
Not that the sudden death didn't kill what was at the time a useful service, and squander goodwill in the process.
Re: An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
#68What a fun surprise to hear about the Foy info desk on HN! When I went to student orientation at Auburn, they made a point to call the desk as a demonstration and ask how many M&Ms would fit into Jordan-Hare Stadium. The answer was provided in under a minute. Back in the early 2010s when I was going to Auburn, the smartphone internet was still pretty young. It wasn't uncommon to call the Foy info desk to settle an ar…
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Re: An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
#69I remember RPI had something like this in the 1990s. I can't remember what it was called though. But I do remember how impressed everyone was: if you call this phone number, they can answer ANY question! I believe those of us who were around from then to now experienced peak information. We went from having to look things up in libraries to being able to find anything with a Google search. We're on the downward slope…
I remember “learning to use the library” was a thing growing up in the 90’s. It was funny because we’d come far along enough with the internet stuff that even the adults teaching this basically knew it was going to be a very niche skill. But still, something that every educated person was supposed to know how to do.
Re: An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
#70I remember RPI had something like this in the 1990s. I can't remember what it was called though. But I do remember how impressed everyone was: if you call this phone number, they can answer ANY question! I believe those of us who were around from then to now experienced peak information. We went from having to look things up in libraries to being able to find anything with a Google search. We're on the downward slope…
I remember “learning to use the library” was a thing growing up in the 90’s. It was funny because we’d come far along enough with the internet stuff that even the adults teaching this basically knew it was going to be a very niche skill. But still, something that every educated person was supposed to know how to do.
That's still an important skill! You might think that everything that can be digitized has been and is easily available online, but that's not the case. Especially so for more obscure books and publications that are mostly relevant to your local area.
When I moved to my current town and visited their library, I very quickly found some books written about the local area for which not much info existed online. It's a great way to spend some time if you're into that kind of thing!