Is that restaurant any good? Ask 1-877-456-DATA

Geoff Zweig, Patrick Nguyen, and a bunch of other guys from the MSR speech team just published a paper called "The Voice-Rate Dialog System for Consumer Ratings", which unless you're a speech scientist you would probably never see, but look at the very cool phone number buried inside:  1-877-456-DATA  (1-877-456-3282 if you can't see the letters on your dial pad).  It lets you call and ask about ratings on reviews of over a million products and businesses.

Say you're thinking of stopping for some coffee at an upscale-looking espresso place. You can't decide between it and Starbucks, so you call the number for Voicerate and ask for the ratings on "Espresso Vivace".  This happens to be my favorite coffee place in the world, so I'm not surprised when the system says it's rated 4.9 out of 5.0.

This is a perfect example of where SR can be very useful. You're away from a computer or smartphone and you need a specific piece of information. The MSR team has put special brainpower into so-called "large grammar" systems like this that involve selecting one of millions of distinct names and the precision in this case really shows.

Try for yourself!  It's really an amazing service.  The team somehow pulled in an extensive database of business and product ratings from MSN Shopping and other services, so it already has an extensive set of ratings.  If you don't find what you're looking for, it will also let you leave a rating.