My Line, powered by Google
16334
wp-singular,portfolio_page-template-default,single,single-portfolio_page,postid-16334,wp-theme-bridge,bridge-core-3.3.4.8,qode-optimizer-1.2.3,qode-page-transition-enabled,ajax_fade,page_not_loaded,,qode-smooth-scroll-enabled,qode-theme-ver-30.8.8.9,qode-theme-bridge,disabled_footer_top,qode_header_in_grid,qode-portfolio-single-template-1,wpb-js-composer js-comp-ver-9.0,vc_responsive

My Line, powered by Google

Category
Branding, Digital, Strategy, UX, Video
About This Project

Setup

In Colombia, nearly half the population had no smartphone. In river towns and mountain villages, mobile data was either too expensive or not there at all. Google had the answers, but millions of people had no way to ask. Colombia’s Ministry of Information and Communications Technologies (MinTIC) and MullenLowe SSP3 set out to change that with the one technology almost everyone already had: a phone line.

The idea

My Line turned an ordinary phone number into a door to Google. Anyone could dial 6000913 from a landline, a basic phone or a pay phone, ask a question out loud and hear the answer read back. It needed no app, no data plan and no screen.

How it was built

Cainkade, a New York technology and design studio, built the bridge. A voice gateway answered each call and streamed the audio to Cainkade’s cloud middleware. From there, Google Cloud Speech-to-Text turned the question into text, even though phone lines carry only a narrow band of sound and accents vary across Colombia. Google Assistant and Search found the answer. The middleware then rewrote it for the ear: no links, no lists, just a short spoken reply. Google Cloud Text-to-Speech read it back to the caller.

Three problems shaped the engineering:

  • Remembering the caller. A landline gives you only a caller ID, so the server kept each conversation going until the caller hung up.
  • Speed. Audio was processed in small chunks, so the reply felt like a conversation, not a phone menu.
  • Scale. The cloud setup grew on its own as the national campaign drove calls.

My part

I supported the work as Creative Director and Head of User Experience at Cainkade. I helped shape how the service should sound and behave on a call, alongside the engineers who built the system.

The outcome

My Line won the Grand Prix in Innovation at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, along with three Gold and four Silver Lions. That made it the fourth most awarded campaign at the festival. More importantly, it gave millions of Colombians their first way to search, with nothing but a phone call.

Related Projects