What Does Google Get Out of Voice?

Posted by timothy on Tuesday March 27, 2012 @02:11AM from the achieving-sentience-takes-patience dept.

itwbennett writes "Assuming Google isn't offering Voice out of the goodness of their hearts, what's the payoff? One likely, if cynical, possibility is that Google Voice is 'just another feeder for their vast database on you,' writes Kevin Purdy in a recent blog post. Or maybe Google just wants to get better at speech-to-text, and collecting your voice messages is just one big voice-mining effort. 'They already did it with GOOG-411, the free phone directory service that mined voices across the country to launch Google Voice's current transcription offering,' says Purdy. For its part, Google says it has no plans to monetize Voice beyond the international calling and number porting fees that it currently charges."

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Voice mining is everything. by ronocdh · 2012-03-27 02:22 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Given Apple's success with Siri, Google has a long way to go to make their products as user-friendly as possible in the vaguely futuristic way Siri offers. Also, when you install Google Voice, it asks you whether you want to turn on Personalized Voice Recognition, so that Google can pick your voice out of a mess of voices. No, thanks.