Google Wants Your Voice Data

00_NOP writes "Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, has told New Scientist that one of the reasons the search engine launched Google Voice is that it needs more human voice data to perfect the sort of 'big data, simple algorithm' probabilistic approach to translating voices to text that drives Google Translate. Norvig says that no one is listening to your calls on Google Voice — it is simply their servers trying to get the translation right."

Comments

Re:Self-checking

[msauve]

"How do servers assess whether they've got the translation correct without having a human-in-the-loop to listen to the conversation and concurrently read what the server translated?"

If you log into your Google Voice page, and look at a translated message, in the lower right corner there is the question - "Transcript useful?" along with yes/no checkboxes. If you check one, it asks if you want to "donate" that VM to improve the translations, you can answer yes/no/never:

Want to help Google's automated transcription get better? Donated voicemails will be listened to, manually transcribed, and used to improve our transcribing server's accuracy. They are only used for this purpose.

Re:Google is breaking wiretapping laws everywhere

[amRadioHed]

Do you not understand what voicemail is? How can record a message for someone without consenting to it being recorded?