Speaking Sensis

The word android conjures many images. From the days of early science fiction, androids were human-like machines built to do our dirty work or make up for our failings. But when things went wrong – watch out!

In 2007 they morphed. Android was rumoured (wrongly) to be Google’s first mobile handset. Launched soon thereafter, we found out that Android was in fact Google’s mobile operating system and the marketing collateral featured little green robots. But calling Android a mobile operating system is not doing it justice. It is so much more than that. And this is why the Whereis® Navigator team worked furiously to launch its turn-by-turn GPS navigation app alongside Telstra’s recent market launches of the HTC Desire and Sony Ericsson Xperia Android powered smartphones.

So do all the motherhood statements around Android like its “open source” accessibility and its ability to deliver “seamless integration” between apps and the native operating system really stack up?

We think so.

The ultimate test is always (and always will be) the increased usability and enhanced experiences delivered to customers. Ultimately, functions that are “native” to the device, Telstra and Sensis apps and third party applications may all interact and “mash” together in one big happy family.

That brave new world is all in the future but here are a few examples of what Whereis® Navigator is doing with Android right here, right now …

Firstly, Whereis® Navigator integrates with Android’s voice recognition software, allowing customers to perform voice searches for Yellow Pages® listings and nearby points of interest. It can even be used to bring up a list of traffic events and search for fuel prices nearby! It might sound simple, but there is actually a lot happening underneath the hood here – seamlessly and in the blink of an eye!

This functionality takes advantage of Google’s multilingual voice to text conversion capability converting words like “pizza” to text and then Yellow Pages’ ability to take the result and return pizza results back to the user based on relevancy and/or proximity.

It’s not totally hands free yet (the user needs to initiate the voice function), but it’s getting close.

From there, Whereis® Navigator picks up the baton and provides multiple options to the hungry customer to get to their selected pizza restaurant with options such as “click to call”, “navigate” and “SMS location to a friend”.

And if a user chooses to “navigate”, then not only is Whereis® Navigator launched but in the near future a user initiated “event” such as a click will be captured client side and reported back to the Yellow Pages® team.

The last point isn’t that exciting to the customer – but it is to the Yellow Pages® advertiser who wants demonstrated ROI and evidence that users were actually directed to their business.

Users can also launch Whereis® Navigator from the Android phone’s address book – no weaving in and out of applications and yet another example of the Whereis® application working with and integrating directly within the mobile operating system itself.

There are other things like creating shortcuts, selecting events and addresses from calendar and saving links to the mobile home screen that, when selected, launch Whereis® Navigator and automatically direct them to a favourite destination.

Stay tuned for more news on Whereis® Navigator including what else is on our future roadmap.