Google Voice
Here’s something I don’t understand, besides “The Google” in general. Google Voice is a telecommunications service. Remember GrandCentral? It’s a phone number, voicemail service doodad that Google acquired a long time ago.
Why the heck does a search company that makes revenue from advertisers need a telecomm branch? Hmm…
Well, after some thought (about 4 seconds, actually – which is an eternity for some people), I remembered this article (link), here, in case you don’t want to click through to CNET:
Google has elevated the profile of its attempt to make videos searchable through speech recognition technology, a move that portends a potentially more financially successful YouTube division.
The speech recognition technology was used in an online application that let people search political speeches launched in July, and now the Gaudi (Google Audio Indexing) project has an official interface at Google Labs.
So, to speculate on my own, I’m saying that looks and feels a hell of a lot like an incentive to get into telecommunications for Google. I mean, who wouldn’t want to better target ads based on speech? That’s where the true person lives, emails and search strings include alter-ego’s and false courage. But voice!? Voice is where the real us is.
I welcome this service, in fact – why not? If I’m going to be advertised at, the least “they” could do is give me something I might be interested in, instead of sex pills or whatever.
The New York Times was nice enough to graze over the incentive at the bottom of their lengthy feature article about how Google Voice gets to compete with Skype (which I love, by the way):
“It raises two distinct problems,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “In the privacy world, it is increased profiling and tracking of users without safeguards. But the other problem is the growing consolidation of Internet-based services around one dominant company.”
The service is currently only active for current members of GrandCentral, but (as NYTimes stated) it should be available to assymilate the masses in a couple of weeks. Resistance is futile.
