Everybody loves to cha-cha-cha

A young man I was teaching in a Sunday School class today introduced me to ChaCha.

ChaCha is a question answering service for mobile devices. I tried it and it's pretty cool.

You just send a text message with a question to CHACHA (242242). For fun, I typed my first question this afternoon: "How long is a marathon?" I got an answer in just a couple of minutes:

The marathon is a long-distance running event with an official distance of 42.195 kilometers (26 miles 385 yards) road race.

Wow. That was interesting, I figured, but it's still pretty lame because it's a bot (a computer) and therefore can only answer common questions. I asked another common question: "Who is Gordon B. Hinckley?"

Gordon B. Hinckley is the 15th President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

The Church is represented. Nice! I can forgive the capitalization error and the missing hyphen. I figured I would ask an uncommon question next: "Who is Joel Dehlin?"

Chief Information Officer for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Huh. At this point, I was starting to wonder if was actually a bot or maybe a human. I tested it: "What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?"

That depends, is it an African or European swallow? A swallow needs to beat its wings forty-three times every second, right?

I was a little dumb-founded. Either the computer was trained to interpolate Monty Python quotes, they were really good at planning for what stupid questions someone like me might ask or I was texting with a human. Later I found out that ChaCha is, in fact, staffed by humans and you can ask just about anything and get a reasonable answer (directions, movie review, sports scores, restaurant recommendations, etc.). The answer is limited to 160 or so characters of text so you'll want to avoid questions like my friend Eric Denna's favorite: "Define the universe and give three examples." But for simple answers to a surprisingly broad set of questions--basically anything a reasonably smart person can find on the Internet in a few minutes--it's a really neat service I'll be using often.

And it's free--at least for now.