What Does Google Get Out of Voice?

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."

Comments

Re:What it gets?

[Binkleyz]

All your phone numbers are belong to us.

Re:Google: World's biggest statistical service

[AdrianKemp]

No, you really can't get away with saying that.

Google made 96% of it's money in 2011 from ads. They are an ad company.

They are an ad company that is trying new things and maybe making an honest effort to diversify, but they are an ad company.

http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html

Re:Do No Net Evil

[jellomizer]

I think the reason is simple. To keep you on Google and thinking of Google.

Google makes most of its money off of adds. Mostly from Google Search. The Google Search has competitors, Bing, Yahoo, etc... Offering services such as voice gmail, maps, etc... tries to make sure that your computing needs is close to Google. So if you are going to search there is a search box close by just ready for you to use it, and get related adds visible.