Free Driving Directions by Cell Phone

[rbrown1205]

I just discovered an extremely useful telephone number for those of us who do not have GPS in our cars or cell phones. Bing has a toll free telephone number that will provide driving directons by cell phone. It is provided by voice, and you can have it repeated as often as you want, and you can even skip ahead some steps if you already know how to get out of your neighborhood. Of course you do lose minutes on your cell phone, plus they have an optional arrangement where the directions can be sent in print to your cell phone as a message, which also deducts minutes according to your plan. But those of us who find ourselves lost while going places from time to time, or if we haven't printed out a mapquest, Yahoo or Google driving directions sheet when going somewhere new might find this to be a real time and gas (and nerves) saver.

The phone number is : 888-247-2425

Please put it in your cell phone, you will never know when you might need it.

(Not making money off of this recommendation!! If anyone knows of any similar services, by all means post them)

[surfergirl]

That's a great idea. I will have to ask around in Aussie. See if there is a no. For the directions.

[rbrown1205]

I have tried it personally and this is my experience:

Long directions could turn out to be a little expensive, a 15 step set, for instance, will either take online minutes away while you drive through the vocal directions, or it will take textdownload minutes away if you ask to send the directions in a series of messages, because it won't send more than 3 steps per message, and on my cell phone's system, a received text message costs 30 minutes.

But the directions themselves are very helpful, and are as accurate as mapquest, etc. Probably the cheapest way to get your directions is to stop and write them down as they are given, and you can ask to repeat them as often as you have to.

A negative thing that they really should fix is voice translation. Sometimes, but not always, the system just can't understand the to and from addresses that you give. Since it is not GPS based, it depends on translating your voice and matching the addresses to its database. And if you are lost, you are responsible for finding out the address of your starting point (fast food and gas stations are good starting addresses).

Perhaps one way to fix it would be if there was a way to text the addresses to them. I don't think they have that yet. And probably because it is essentially free (except for the usage minutes), you don't have the option to talk to a live person, so after a round of wrong guesses, it "kindly" hangs up. You can call them back, though, and then you start all over again.