Re: A question about Google and Google voice

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Milan Merhar <reference.desk () gmail com>
Date: April 12, 2009 3:50:52 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] A question about Google and Google voice

Dave,

That argument had been confirmed as part of the rationale for Google's  
launching of its GOOG-411 (voice-activated search) telephone service,  
as described in this article. Whether or not similar data mining is  
being performed on their newer voice chat service has to my knowledge  
not be revealed.

Personally, I believe that the significance of any privacy issues may  
be strongly dependent on implementation.  As you say, in the worst  
case conversations are recorded then replayed for analysis, creating a  
corpus that becomes an enticing target for "mission creep" usage.  
However, if the mandate is only to refine a "pretty good" voice  
recognizer into a "very good" speaker-independent one, I speculate  
that it might be possible to do so without divulging the contents of  
any one conversation, e.g. by utilizing single words sampled from many  
different conversations, rather than many words sampled from one  
conversation. I'm sure that some will still question whether this is  
adequate, especially given how difficult it would be to verify such  
promised behavior.

- milan


On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 2:40 PM, David Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:
 I have heard reasonable support for  belief that one of the reasons  
that Google has implemented Google voice is a belief that voice  
control will be an important input path in the future. What better way  
to gather a sampling of a wide variety of voices and potentially a  
very large experimental test data set   for voice recognition than to  
provide a service such as Google voice.

If, and I have no direct evidence to support or deny this, they are  
recording and saving the conversations from Google voice this raises a  
critical question about privacy and maybe a legal question  or two.

So I am asking readers to keep their ears open for any information  
that would support or deny this concern.

Dave


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