Why did Google shut down GOOG-411?

From Daniel Feygin on Quora:

GOOG-411 was never a product. It was a mechanism through which users trained Google’s speech recognition, which was itself destined to become a feature of other applications. With Android’s increasing use of speech recognition, Google must now believe that they are beyond the point where additional training through GOOG-411 is necessary.

Sounds familiar? That’s because Google is known for this “outside of the box” thinking.

I’ve highlighted their ReCAPTCHA service in the past. The idea behind GOOG-411 was the same. Google had a problem on their hands (an untrained speech recognition platform), so they came up with a simple solution to solve it (offer a free 411 service). 

Genius.