Human guides do the ChaCha over text queries

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With no fear of the confusion that can arise from text-message shorthand, a new search service is employing a novel tool to answer queries sent by cell phones: human beings.

Having a person — rather than an automated service — field your questions while you’re out and about is appealing in a range of scenarios: finding a recipe for banana pudding, settling a TV trivia dispute, locating a quality thin-crust pizza in a specific neighborhood.

And, as long as an answer can be found online, ChaCha promises that a “guide,” reached by sending a text message to 242242 (CHACHA), will respond in an average of 3 minutes, though some answers take 10 minutes or longer.

Except for a few kinks, ChaCha worked as advertised in the days before and after its Jan. 3 launch. My query for a simple meatloaf recipe took 4 minutes to satisfy. Questions such as “What is Scott Baio’s middle name?” were answered within 2 minutes: “Scott Vincent James Baio was born in 1961.”

ChaCha is free for now, but the company plans to start charging $5 to $10 a month starting in the spring. In contrast, Google’s SMS service is free but can troll only for automated information such as phone numbers, stock quotes, currency conversions and weather updates.

5,000 freelance ‘guides’
ChaCha, based in Carmel, Ind., has about 5,000 freelance “guides” across the country and promises that at least 10 percent are logged on at any given time. The guides can sign in whenever they want, but the company says it works out that at least 500 are always online.

ChaCha CEO and founder Scott Jones said that base of workers could be dramatically scaled up in a short time if needed. Most of the guides are college students, stay-at-home parents or retired. They’re paid an undisclosed fee for each message they answer, and they work whatever schedule they choose.

For the near term, ChaCha plans to split the fees it earns with cell carriers, although Jones would not disclose details and no carrier has agreed to a fee structure.

[Read: MSNBC]