By Sharla Sikes

It’s not the first foray into ad-supported IP calling, and it’s certainly far from the last: start-up service The Pudding plans to offer free international calling supported by targeted ads.

Pudding Media Inc., cofounded by Israeli entrepeneur Ariel Maislos, offers a service similar to Skype. The calls are free to the users, but callers must watch commercials on their computer screens.

So, what type of ads, you ask? Well, that’s where the “catch” to this business scheme comes in.

Voice-recognition software listens to the callers and chooses ads based on the conversation. If the name of a new movie comes up, for example, the service will play an advertisement related to that movie.

“Our product will enable smart placement of advertisements for various audio services,” Maislos said in an interview with TheMarker IT. “We are already capable of analyzing conversations in English and we can place the relevant commercials. … Soon we will be able to offer our services to Asian and other non English speaking markets as well.”

Maislos said the idea stemmed from the fact that many people multi-task while on the phone.

“We saw that when people are speaking on the phone, typically they were doing something else,” explained Pudding Media’s Chief Executive Ariel Maislos, to the New York Times. “They had a lot of other action, either doodling or surfing or something else like that. So we said, ‘Let’s use that’ and actually present them with things that are relevant to the conversation while it’s happening.”

Consumers may be hesitant to choose a service knowing that anyone—even software—is listening in. Google faced similar complaints about its keyword-based ad content in Gmail, but the Google empire is known and trusted to most Internet-savvy people.

The Pudding shares a development manager with Shopping.com, Israel Ziv.

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