Where is Google going with Skype?

There are rumors that Google is eyeing Skype. For Ebay, Skype did not work out. I think things might pan out differently for Google.

While it would certainly be very interesting if Google were planning to use Skype as its main voice application for Android-based phones, I don’t think the carriers would be happy about that. I frankly don’t know how that would work out.

Another cool thing Google could do is integrate Skype to Gmail. Perhaps this is where they are going with this thing?

There are a number of companies transcribing voicemail so that users can receive it as text in their email. Spinvox, for instance, just raised a lot of money to do just that. That is certainly cool, but what about transcribing your entire phone conversations so that you can go back and search through them in your inbox? That would be move valuable I think. And for Google it would be great. Google is, after all, primarily a search engine and by transcribing phone calls Google would effectively be creating yet another space for search.

And if you have that technology all ironed out you should be able to transcribe videos as well. Google already has the YouTube platform for video. So they should also be able to tie that back to Gmail and let people search, not only through a video’s tags and descriptions, but through its actual audio content.