This reminds me of Google Talk Guru, the Google bot that lets you ask simple questions. It was an experimental service a few years ago. I'm not sure if it's still accepting invitations, but it still works for me in Google Talk or Gmail Chat: You can try to "friend" the bot by adding guru@googlelabs.com to your contact list. I sometimes still use it for a quick reference.
Very cool! You might also want to add weather, amazon/yelp ratings for products/places, directions from place a to b and location based search (coffee near staples center, la). Would be super useful for people on the move without access to a data plan.
Do you have any plans to scale it here or are you only showing it as a proof-of-concept and will be shortly moving it to developing countries (where data service is less common)?
Also, what's the point of the link at the end, if you're using SMS for this type of info it seems kinda unlikely that you have a phone that can handle data...
Whit is an open source SMS service, which allows you to query CrunchBase, Wikipedia, and several other data APIs. Simply text 917-791-3098. Special commands include: P:'personName', C:'companyName', S:'stockTicker', W:'wikiSearch' ex. queries: 'p:bill gates', 'c:apple', 's:fb', 'w:philosophy'
I use something similar that I created all the time. Mine connects to the DuckDuckGo API to pull the Zero-click info which is sourced from Wikipedia, Crunchbase, and a bunch of others. I never thought to open source it, but maybe I'll take a few minutes to do that soon.
Sure thing. I'll probably re-do it in Flask because I looked at the code for the first time since last October and it's way more complicated than it needs to be. There are only a few lines of code, but there are a bunch of cruft files for the Perl framework I was using (Dancer). It'll only take a few minutes to port it though.
I have the code up on GitHub, but the server I've been using to host the application myself isn't up right now. I have to debug some problem, but I don't think there is anything wrong with the code (just my deployment process).
holy crap, I was writing a very similar app months ago, based on very similar premises, but I sorta gave up (actually got too busy as well, etc) once I read that actually the whole world is going 3g, even most developing countries are experiencing rapid 3g growth[1].
In any case, this looks very cool, seems better-thought-out than my original project. Good luck!
Very interesting, this can be great for people who don't have data plan but can still get useful information by sms. Where does it say it's by Intuit, I don't see Intuit mentioned anywhere?
