Your VoIP Calls Are Being Tapped

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There are only so many ways you can avoid advertisements online these days, but that’s about to change if you’re a VoIP user. Silicon Valley-based The Pudding is implementing an ad structure that’s similar to that of Gmail using speech recognition software that listens in on your conversation and picks out key words that will trigger relevant ads to show up in your web browser. Tests revealed call quality wasn’t affected by the process, which is run on the servers in Fremont, CA.

That’s so utterly annoying, but phone calls within the US and Canada are free and the public trial begins today. Numbers are inputted on the site, which is where the advertisements will appear. It sounds rather obnoxious, but you always have the option to minimize the browser and still get free phone calls unless they’ve concocted some black magic that doesn’t allow you to do that during a call. The Pudding wants to take this to mobile phones in which case I should probably brush up on my smoke signal skills.

The Pudding [via AP]