More than a year ago, Amit Desai had trouble following driving directions while hunting for a new house. He sought an easy way to move from place to place.
Unable to find any high tech systems available on the market to assist him in this quest, Desai — who about five years ago headed up Voxify, a developer of speech recognition technology for call centers — decided to co-found Dial Directions, a firm that provides driving directions to cell phone users on the go.
“The voice-activated phone service lets anybody with a cell phone make a simple free call and say where they want to go and say where they are. Before they hang up the system sends them turn-by-turn driving directions in a text message,” says Desai, co-founder of the Oakland, CA company.
The free service, accessible through the number 347-328-4667 (DIR-ECT-IONS) also gives directions to local outlets of national chains like FedEx, Starbucks and White Castle. The service made its debut in the greater New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles markets in July and is set to expand further this year, he says.
The company, which is now backed by private investors from Silicon Valley, plans to make money from partnerships and advertising, says Desai.
For the moment, Dial Directions is relying on word of mouth and press reports to publicize itself, he notes.
“At some point, we will allow advertisers to put a small unobtrusive line of text at the bottom of the text message directions,” says Desai. “But the call itself will be unencumbered.”
Right now, Dial Directions employs about 12 people mostly in engineering roles. “But we’re growing rapidly, ” says Desai.
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