Wow, sometimes you just have to stand in awe of the genius that is Google. They’ve hyped up a service, GOOG-411, making people think it for the betterment of man to have a free 411 service – when in actuality it was always all about getting vocal samples from people to perfect speech-to-text technology!

This comes from no less than Google VP of Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer, in an interview:

Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model … that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.

The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. … So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we’re trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy.

In many ways that’s Google’s entire M.O. They make you think they are so wonderful by doing things like offering a great service like Gmail for free – when really Gmail, like most Google service, is all about serving you ads.

I don’t really have a problem with any of this because most of Google’s services are great – and most of the time I recognize what Google is really doing – or so I thought. It’s revelations like these that sometimes show you just how naively the rest of the world views Google. As someone said to me recently “Is is just a coincidence that the ads in Gmail match what we’re talking about in our email?”

There is something very creepy about making people think you are doing one thing, when really you have ulterior motives. That is not very ‘do no evil’.