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

A Less Cynical Possiblity

[geoffrobinson]

They get the ability to really improve voice recognition software, the ability to search on audio, etc.

Just a guess.

Re:A Less Cynical Possiblity

[squiggleslash]

...plus they get what they get from GMail: advertising dollars.

Yes, I'm aware that the Android apps don't show apps. But the websites do. And the chances are that if you use GV, you use the websites as well as the apps. I read* half my voicemails in GMail.

I'm kind of baffled by this article to be honest. In any other case, a site funded by ads on the web front-end, and payments for premium services, would not generate this kind of stupid question! But if it's GOOGLE, OMG! They must be up to something!

* For those who think that's an error, which will compromise of 90% of Slashdotters based upon my experience, please find out what Google Voice is. Go to voice.google.com and take a look. Yes, I read my voicemails.

Language Barrier

[jduhls]

Speech recognition is essential in order to achieve the inevitable pre-singularity destruction of the language barrier. They want to monetize that destruction. They are a business. Duh.

Google: World's biggest statistical service

[antifoidulus]

Author hits the nail on the head. A lot of people debate whether Google is a search company or an ad company, truth is it's neither, it's the world's biggest statical service, gathering up and analyzing massive amounts of statistics(for good or for ill). Their main way of monetizing that right now is ads, but they are already starting to branch out. For instance you can pay to have Google's pattern matching technology mine through your own company's data to find trends, classify things etc. And I imagine that Google is looking towards other markets beyond ads, and for that they will need lots and lots of data, your data....

Re:Voice mining is everything.

[Calos]

Also, when you install Google Voice, it asks you whether you want to turn on Personalized Voice Recognition,

With you so far...

so that Google can pick your voice out of a mess of voices.

[citation needed]

I personally have seen nothing that indicates this is why Google asks you to do this, and no evidence of it. Do you have any evidence?

It could be that this might also be somewhat useful in that regard, but the most obvious and most likely use is that it will make your voice transcription more accurate. It will learn your quirks and how to deal with you accent.

My Asian and Indian coworkers can't use Siri, and most have stopped trying out of frustration. It can't understand their accent, and doesn't seem to get any better over time. That is the most obvious reason why Google would want to do this.