Most of these companies are not lacking in the amount of data the can collect about you.

I find it hard to believe that listening in on random conversations, collecting the audio stream, processing it, data mining it, accounting for substantial noise - is worth the effort for any of these companies.

Maybe for a smaller startup. When you're already a $1T company - this just doesn't seem like a good or valuable data source. Not to mention, it is an OBVIOUS gigantic hit to your trust.

Yeah I think you're right here? Maybe my loss leader presumption is wrong and it's some combination of:

- We can build Echos/etc. cheaply and make a profit

- We're working on speech recognition/AI anyway, so we have the data centers

- We can subsidize this work by selling ad data

> When you're already a $1T company

On the other hand, maybe when you're that big you've already covered the low-hanging fruits (and so did your competitors) and now need even more?

This is a false assumption.

It's so much easier to grow Amazon .1% than to discover a new $100M business.

They only need to collect it and do voice recognition: the ad buyers are more than happy to buy the text and do the rest of the data mining.

“Sell my product to anyone that mentions fridge” Yanno?

That feels like the kind of thing that sounds good on the surface, but breaks down when you actually try to size it. The incremental value of that data vs search data seems nearly 0 - I would guess almost everyone who has searched for a fridge has said some variation of "fridge" out loud, and there would be so much additional noise from people who say it but aren't in any way intending to buy a new fridge.

But don't get me wrong, it is totally plausible that some eng team somewhere would still build it because it's a shiny new tech, it just doesn't seem like the kind of thing that has any real world value.

I feel like you’re overestimating the difficulty of having a word cloud AI trained for relevant phrases. Not just fridge, but (to continue my poor example) “fridge doesn’t keep vegetables crisp long enough”, “wish my fridge had a screen”, “going to renovate the kitchen this summer”, “the neighbours have a better fridge than us, it’s red and shiny”. These are all juicy indicators for possible high-ticket purchases in the current sales cycle.

I think because the companies have stated outright that they're not using voice data for advertising, and people assume large companies aren't committing fraud against them.