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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."
Nonsense. The reals reason is that Google maintains a very complex evil portfolio that they need to offset with good assets by the end of the fiscal year. Capitalism and the free market has turned their "do no evil" slogan into "do no net evil." As a result, Google Voice generates rare and coveted benidons that are traded on the moral exchange. One benidon offsets one hedon as a base unit at the end of the year. While Microsoft and Apple executives Scrooge McDuck in their massive hedon reserves and show them off to investors, every year Google struggles more and more to finish in the white.
My work here is dung.
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
They get the ability to really improve voice recognition software, the ability to search on audio, etc.
Just a guess.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
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.
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....
Monstar L
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.
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.
I vote based on politicians' actions, unless contrary to my preconceptions. Often wrong, never uncertain. #iamthe99%
I paid $10 on Google Voice for calling a relative in the Middle East. However, I've paid $0 in ten years of using Google's other servces. Don't underestimate the price of calling non-western countries.
All your phone numbers are belong to us.
Do you have even the slightest idea of what you're talking about?
It was bad enough when the critics insisted that Google Voice was some VoIP service, and you now think it's a voice command system?
Google Voice is a really cool voicemail, call screening, redirection, and discounted international calls service. The only speech recognition it does is a transcription service for incoming voicemails (so you can read them rather than listen to them.) The transcriptions are rarely anything close to perfect, but usually good enough to get the gist.
It's not VoIP (although it's integrated quite nicely with Google Talk so it can be _part_ of a VoIP system if you want), it's not voice commands, it's a pretty unique and, in my view (disclaimer: I own ONE share of GOOG) awesome enhancement to your phone system.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.