A Very Smart Phone

What's the capital of Cameroon? How about the atomic weight of cobalt? Do they call it "football" or "soccer" in South America? Help is as close as your mobile phone: just dial 63336 in Britain, type in your query as a text message and for $1.80 a new company called AQA will text you back your answer.

AQA, which stands for "any question answered," is the London-based brainchild of Colly Myers, a mobile-industry veteran who used to run handheld-device company Psion and cell-phone operating-system vendor Symbian, which he left in 2002. His idea for AQA flashed a year ago at Lord's cricket ground in London. While England was playing South Africa, Myers was struggling with a crossword puzzle that wanted four letters for a herring. "I sent a text to someone and got my answer [shad]," he says. "I thought, This is neat — let's press on.'"

How does it work? Most of the questions are answered by humans rather than by computers, which Myers describes as "notoriously pathetic" at understanding natural language. AQA has a team of 50 researchers (which Myers hopes to enlarge to 200 by the end of the year) who scurry for facts. An AQA computer hangs onto the answers, so that when questions repeat, the computer replies. Computers also fetch the most straightforward answers, such as stock prices.

Caveat emptor: the answers are not always timely. It recently took AQA three days to answer a question about the average first-day price rise of new issues on the London Stock Exchange. But Myers says AQA answers 80% of all questions in less than five minutes; he's aiming to knock that down to about two minutes.

At the moment, only U.K. customers can use the service, which is available through the country's four largest mobile network operators — Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and O2, who tack the charge onto your monthly bill or deduct it from your pay-as-you-go credit. But the firm plans to roll out AQA in South Africa, Australia and either France or Germany early next year, followed by other countries including the U.S.

What's the most common query for the two-month-old service? "'What is the meaning of life?' is quite high up,'' says Myers. He adds that pubs are a natural habitat for AQA users — much as they have been for Shazam, the popular two-year-old service that identifies the names and artists of songs. AQA has given rise to what Myers calls "ego texting," in which twentysomethings "look for fame" by showing off to their friends that AQA knows something about them. People can also check practical information such as train schedules and event listings, but AQA will only go so far on some subjects. It will not provide legal or financial advice. On sexual matters, it might give an opinion on whether size matters, but "if someone asks us how to locate a prostitute, we won't answer," says Myers. With hundreds of calls a day and on track to reach what Myers says will be "thousands a day in the U.K. alone by the end of the year," AQA has other entrepreneurs asking the same question: "Why didn't I think of that?"