Your Personal Wire Service Based on Your Phone Conversation?

There's an interesting article in the NY Times this morning about Pudding Media, a company that plans an Internet phone phone service that would listen in to your conversation and deliver targeted advertisements to your computer while you talk. Seems like someone could easily do a similar thing with press releases: Suppose I call you up and we are talking about the latest blog measurement techniques and as we speak the service listens in and chooses all the latest press releases on blog measurement and the titles scroll down the side of our screens. Just what my ADD needs. Could come in handy, but how often?

Hey, could be useful. Maybe you could use it for search, like Google but on the phone. So if you forget the name of that restaurant you are trying to tell your friend about, you just start speaking the zip code and "Italian food" and "zabaglione" and whatever you do remember and eventually the restaurant's name comes up on your screen.

But it would have to be some pretty smart voice recognition software on the other end to make rapid sense of the subject matter of the phone call. And it would have to happen fast, 'cause a lot of calls are pretty short. And a whole lot of people would have to get used to the fact that something is listening to them on the phone.