1-800-GOOG-411 is a very cool Google service, currently in Google Labs, that provides free voice 411 using high quality voice recognition and speech synthesis.  To use it, just dial that number from any phone and say the city. state and business you’re looking for.  

Here’s a sample voice session from DownloadSquad:

1-800-GOOG-411 joins 1-800-FREE-411 from Jingle Networks and Tellme’s mobile 411 app. 

1-800-FREE-411 already controls six percent of the US mobile directory market.  Tellme’s application allow users to search using their voice and interact with the results on their phone’s screen; Tellme was recently acquired by Microsoft.

All of these applications are signs of the coming collapse of the walled garden that carriers have traditionally enacted around voice and data services, spurred by advances in mobile phone platforms and the reduced cost of VOIP and voice recognition applications. 

The aggressive positions being staked out by Google and Microsoft in the mobile data services space will undoubtedly disrupt the carriers’ business models. 

That’s great news for customers’ wallets– carriers formerly used their virtual monopoly over the customer to charge $1.25 for directory assistance. 

It’s also great news for innovation and the growth of a mobile services ecosystem. Carriers have the potential to offer tremendously valuable mobile services to their users, and tremendously valuable data to advertisers, but have lacked the technical firepower to effectively do either. In the end, for the more enlightened carriers, the disruption caused by open mobile platforms and data services will work to their benefit as well.