A couple of text answer services — with the same idea as AQA or Texperts in the UK: you text in a question, and they write back (hopefully) with an answer — have launched in the US, called Johnny27 (via SMS Text News), and ChaCha (via AP).

They do basically the same thing, with one big difference: Johnny27 costs $1.99 per question, ChaCha is free (for now, anyway). I gave ChaCha a whirl earlier to check its accuracy and speed, and was impressed. It was able to tell me the winner of the 1987 baseball World Series and provide me with the name and address of the nearest bowling alley to my house in about two minutes and twenty seconds each time, from the time I opened the messaging application on my E61 to the time I got the response. That said, I got the answer to my bowling alley query from Google SMS in about 40 seconds; searching for the baseball answer took about 1:20 using Opera Mini, though it was over WiFi.

The big difference, though — natural language. I simply texted “Who won the world series in 1987?” and “Where can I go bowling near 89135?” to ChaCha’s shortcode, 242242 (that’s chacha on the keypad). To use Google’s service, you have to know the right lingo (in this case, a simple “bowling 89135″ worked, but there’s quite a list of others to remember); using the built-in search box on the start page of Opera Mini was pretty easy, but that’s probably not a realistic normob usage scenario.

I can see this sort of service becoming fairly popular here, especially if it’s free. ChaCha apparently plans to start charging $5-$10 per month in a few months, which seems steep, though they’re also looking at ways of using ad support. Johnny27’s $2 per message makes it a non-starter in my eyes, as these services are offering a commodity — that is, what makes it worth a premium price over other services? Better answers? And how can a user tell?

For all the hype around the mobile search space, I wonder if these sorts of services, that in many ways are much easier to use than automated search engines, are where the real growth will be. ChaCha includes a URL in its response, with a link to its site where the user can see their question and answer, and get a link to the site where the human guide found the answer, and they could easily put in links for queries that need more info, or to maps, or other useful information.

If you give ChaCha, Johnny27, or any other similar services a shot, let me know what your experiences have been like in the comments — especially if you’ve been able to stump them!