Gmail Voice Is set Future Search, Not Free Calls [Google]

Sex, Bombs and Burgers author Peter Nowak explains how Google Voice in Gmail has nothing to do with supplying you with free phone calls. It’s actually here to assist Google perfect the subsequent generation of search.

Yesterday’s most enjoyable news was Google’s introduction of free voice calls to Gmail. In a nutshell, when you’ve got a Gmail account, you are able to now make free calls from your computer to real landlines and cellphones in North America. You may as well call anything of the sector for peanuts, with many countries costing only 2 cents a minute.

The announcement is essential for a lot of reasons. For one, it’s direct competition for Skype, which was already pretty direct competition to landline and cellphone companies. Skype has made calling virtually free – I currently pay about $35 a year for unlimited calls within North America through its SkypeOut service, that is obviously a fraction of what phone companies charge.

In the U.S., the computer-based Gmail service works nicely with Google Voice , that’s another free calling service that lets smartphone owners use their data plan as opposed to their voice plan to make calls. In other words, you don’t really need a voice plan to make phone calls with Google Voice; just the info connection will do. And while the Gmail service is currently shackled to the computer, there’s no realistic this is why it’ll stay that way.

Here’s why Google will beat Skype and every other phone company: to those other companies, it’s still about phone calls and working out the right way to make cash from them. But, because the actual cost of constructing a decision over the net is nearly zero, Google can afford to swallow this rather incidental cost as a future investment toward its real business: search.

In Sex, Bombs and Burgers , I seek advice from Franz Och, the guy behind Google Translate. The company’s award-winning and pretty accurate service uses statistical machine translation, an algorithm that studies patterns in numerous written languages and then predicts the implications in another language. The system’s accuracy is based entirely on the number of documents it has to work with; the larger the comparison database, the more accurate the translation.

In 2007, the hunt company launched Google 411, a service you could call and ask questions, similar to the address of a business. The service would send you the requested information back in a text message. The purpose of 411 wasn’t so much for Google to supply you with a rather convoluted information delivery system, but more for the company to assemble voice samples to take advantage of in building a higher voice search system, inside the same way that documents were used to build Translate’s database.

Och, in building his original translation system, used United Nations documents because there were millions of them, and they were all already translated into the U.N.’s six official languages. It was a treasure trove of knowledge. Google 411 was an identical early attempt at building a database and the trouble bore fruit with the launch of voice-activated search on the iPhone in 2008, however it wasn’t exactly a similar jackpot as the U.N. documents largely because it wasn’t that useful to consumers.

Google Voice, including Gmail calling, is your next step in that process. Google will use the zillions of calls that go over its Voice service to increase its database, so as to allow it to improve the accuracy of its voice search. As the Google Voice privacy policy states:

Google’s computers process the guidelines for your messages for varied purposes, including formatting and displaying the info to you, playing you your messages, backing up your messages, and other purposes with regards to offering you Google Voice.

That ” various purposes” clause is pretty nebulous and may certainly include research and development of search algorithms.

In other words, free phone calls are the jackpot that Google has been trying to find. While Skype and call companies continue to attempt and be able to squeeze pennies out of phone calls, for Google it’s extremely valuable to offer them away for nothing because it is going to help the company develop the following generation of search. In any case, typing our searches into an internet browser is much from the most productive way of finding information. Saying what we wish is way better, and it’s how we’ll primarily be searching within the not-so-distant future.

Peter Nowak is the senior science and technology reporter at CBC.ca. His book Sex, Bombs and Burgers: How War, Porn and Technology Created Technology As We Realize it is on sale now in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, within the U.K. on Nov. 1, and within the U.S. in fall 2011.

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This post is tagged: calls, Gmail, google, NOT, search, set, Voice