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

android phones?

[vlm]

For reasons which are far beyond this post, I can't port my old phone number to my new phone provider, but I CAN port my old number to the mighty GOOG.
Basically its a forwarding service pointing my old number to my android phone.

In the long run, if "phone service" went away and all I had was data service, and I ran google voice over that data service, I'd be OK with that. If I had ubiquitous wifi and could connect to google voice over that, I wouldn't even need "phone" service.

It's a sunk cost

[Jimmy_B]

If Google had won a wireless spectrum auction (they didn't), then Google Voice could've been the core of Google's competition with the telco network. Pieces of it are probably still useful for Android, and it could give them negotiating leverage with carriers. So it could've been really important, but didn't turn out that way. The thing with software products, though, is that almost all of the cost is in the initial creation; once created, they cost very little to keep around. So Google keeps Voice running, because it costs them little and turning it off would be very disruptive.

Re:Do No Net Evil

[Mindcontrolled]

He did, didn't he. And we all know that verbing weirds language!