If you’re still wielding a basic feature phone, you may be familiar with Google SMS Search: it’s a handy tool that lets you text a search query and get a quick result. Or rather, it was a handy tool. Google now confirms that it quietly dropped the service within the past few days, delivering an automated shutdown warning to anyone messaging the short code. A Google employee explains the closure as a simple “streamlining” effort, although we’ve reached out for greater detail. It makes sense that Google would drop SMS Search when basic phones are quickly becoming the minority in a world full of web-friendly smartphones. However, the lack of advance notice could have some in that group upgrading their devices sooner than expected — if that’s even an option in the first place.
Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Mobile, Google
Via: TechCrunch
Source: Google Product Forums
Texting while driving is as big of a no-no as talking on the phone while driving, especially since both activities are distracting and could cause accidents. With the introduction of voice assistants, such as Siri and S Voice and etc. and their ability to convert voice to text, and text to voice and so on, logically it would seem like we might have found a safer alternative to reply and read text messages while driving, right? However a survey conducted by the Texas Transportation Institute thinks otherwise and believes that voice-to-text activities can dull reactions the same way texting while driving might.
