Furthermore, many basic services form a backbone of functionality for larger features. Things like voicemail transcription and 311 speech recognition were likely used to develop better recognition models so that deaf people can now have closed captioning for online videos, and will allow us to have natural interfaces with our public infrastructure in the future. Spam and importance filtering in GMail might be used to research and develop distributed machine learning, which can be used for much larger scale problems in other industries.

I'm glad that Google is working on things like automated cars from the same revenue that they get from something as simple as online advertisements.