While thousands of people visit Times Square everyday, it can be difficult to know where locales are. With “DROID Does Times Square,” Times Square visitors could find whatever they were looking for in the area through DROID’s location-based voice search feature. The Thomson Reuters and NASDAQ signs invited people to call a toll-free number to search for nearby locations. Callers could then say keywords, like “hamburger,” or “T-shirt,” and the search results would appear on a giant Google map on the NASDAQ digital sign.At its core, ''DROID Does Times Square'' is a technological breakthrough, creating new possibilities to use voice recognition in digital signage campaigns. To ensure the experience worked seamlessly, we developed a method to use several DROID devices to process calls and control the signs' content. The end result let Times Square visitors find nearby locations while showcasing the powerful technology of the DROID.

Visitors in Times Square enthusiastically engaged with the experience. Throughout the 16-day event, the campaign received 99 percent participation of all search timeslots—including a 20-hour consecutive run on Black Friday. In addition, a live website stream of the experience received more than 600,000 views. Google engineers were so impressed with the experience that they flew in from California to see it for themselves. But perhaps most importantly, thousands of people experienced a DROID, resulting in the millionth Google-powered DROID device set to be sold by the end of this year, exceeding analyst expectations and establishing a loyal fan base.