What I'm beginning to think is that the "make life easier" and more convenient isn't the primary reason for doing what Google is doing nowadays. Sure, these th

What I'm beginning to think is that the "make life easier" and more convenient isn't the primary reason for doing what Google is doing nowadays. Sure, these things make your life that much more accessible, but as opposed to that being the selling point of the product, it is a sort of a hook, an enticement. It seems to be that by capturing more parts of our personal lives, Google will be able to develop better human language algorithms and sentiment analysis algorithms. I think what we say and correspond in public is a filtered, impersonal language highly adapted to the audience we are speaking to. In addition, language deals a lot with the environment and a lot with contextual and non-verbal clues, more, I suspect, than linguists think. Hence it is difficult to develop accurate human language models from impersonal, public correspondence. But by going into the home, Google will have a better opportunity to directly observe the emotional core that shapes the deepest beliefs and opinions of its consumers, and serve targeted ads to the categories of people who will respond best to said targeted ads. Of course, the data collected have more value than targeted ads. But I think it's well worth keeping an eye on the advertising industry and taking note how their advertisements shape (irrational) demand.