ChaCha's Personal Touch

Technological innovation these days usually connotes efficiency — shoving more bits into a data pipe, handling more transactions with fewer resources. But sometimes innovation can require the opposite of efficiency. In a world where everyone seems to be finding ways of taking human beings out of the equation, ChaCha is including warm bodies in its math.

ChaCha employs 25,000 people to answer questions via mobile communications. At first glance, it may appear to be another directory assistance business, but it offers more than the address or phone number of a restaurant; ChaCha's “guides” can give you a list of all restaurants in your area, noting which ones are open past 10 p.m., accept credit cards and have available tables. They can even tell you which ones are the highest-rated by independent culinary reviewers.

Technically, ChaCha is accessing the same information available to people with full-featured Web browsers, fast connections and time on their hands, but in the mobile environment, users often have none of these.

“We've been conditioned around search on the Web,” said Jay Highley, chief sales and marketing officer for ChaCha. “We've been trained to enter keywords into the box, then Google or Yahoo! will send us links back, and we'll eventually find what we're looking for. … That model doesn't work in mobile.”

ChaCha's engine has both a technology and a personal element, Highley said. The company has developed a meta-database that not only stores information on some of the most common queries, but also plugs into hundreds of other constantly updated databases on and off the Web. All of this information is viewed by its guides — thousands of part-time contractors paid by the question — through a “cockpit” that not only gives instant access to those databases but automatically polls them to come up with the most likely answers to questions.

That kind of attention and expertise requires a lot of diverse personnel, but Highley said ChaCha is making the most of technology it has developed. The company has submitted 40 patents on knowledge and work-force management, all designed to streamline the process of answering questions. Today fewer than 10% of questions are answered automatically — never appearing in front of a guide's eyeballs — but ChaCha is ramping up that percentage as it gains popularity, Highley said. Common and uncommon questions go into a database, which then recognizes future queries on the same topic, automatically spitting out text answers. ChaCha's end goal, however, is not to remove the human element entirely. That is what makes it unique, allowing users to have a conversation rather than just entering keywords, Highley said.

“Machines don't understand conversational English that well,” he said. “If I ask a machine a question in conversational English, the machine will fail to answer it 75% of the time.”