What Does Google Get Out of Voice? 119
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."
Re:What it gets? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Voice mining is everything. (Score:2, Informative)
http://obihai.com/googlevoice.html [obihai.com]
Using all of my previously installed phones, this device turned Google Voice into VOIP. It has been working flawlessly for a few months now to send and receive calls. I got the satisfaction of cancelling with ATT, saving a $30 per month bill, all for a 1 time fee of $50.
This was one of those "See what technology can do when not being impeded by greed" moments. It was a breath of fresh air.
Re:Google: World's biggest statistical service (Score:5, Informative)
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 [google.com]
Re:Do No Net Evil (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:I do not know and do not care! (Score:2, Informative)
I'm sure Google has a similar thing going on like Facebook where companies can pay extra $$$ to get unfettered access to the data as part of "we may share your data with interested third parties".
No they absolutely do not: "We do not share personal information with companies, organizations and individuals outside of Google" (Ref: http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/). There is no "we may share your data with third-parties" clause in the Google privacy policy, unlike almost [visa.com] every [target.com] other [bankofamerica.com] company [facebook.com] out [twitter.com] there [microsoft.com]. Read the links carefully and you will see that Google has one of the best privacy policies (at least in terms on sharing information with third parties). Also note that some of these companies have way more personal and sensitive information about you that Google.
Disclaimers:
* I work at Google
* These are entirely my own views and opinions and do not represent Google's in any way.