LESLEY: Welcome, Marissa Mayer. Thank you for joining us at wowOwow. You are vice president of Google, a person who Charlie Rose called “a legend already” on his program this month. And you’re what — how old are you?

MARISSA: I’m 33.

LESLEY: And you’re a legend. Wow. Well, Marissa, you and I have known each other since 2005, when I did a story on Google for "60 Minutes" and interviewed you because, among other things, you oversee Google Search. I don’t know if you knew this at the time, but you gave me my very first lesson on how to search.

MARISSA: Did I really? I do remember using Google Maps and finding nearby pharmacies.

LESLEY: No, you showed me the home page and what to do and all of that. Marissa, you’re also responsible for new products, or as Business Week said, your job is to help Google out-think your rivals. So let me ask you about a brand-new product that was just introduced called Google Voice. According to what’s been in the newspapers, it’s a phone service – which is free – and could be the death note of the phone companies. So, what is Google Voice and is it the end of phone companies?

MARISSA: Well, I think with all new products, especially ones that try and question the norm and seem disruptive, there’s always a little bit of fear and it’s always a little bit overblown. I don’t think it’s going to be the end of the phone companies. I do think that Google Voice is a really interesting product that’s got a great piece of technology behind it. One of the key features of Google Voice for me is that when people call and leave you a voice mail, Google Voice transcribes it and sends it to you via e-mail, which is really nice. So if you’re at work and it’s not a great time to take a phone call, you still get your messages and you can actually reply via e-mail to that person.

LESLEY: Oh, I like that.

MARISSA: So, yes, it’s really nice. And the core piece of technology behind that is speech to text. We now have speech models that are good enough that, with different voices, different accents, different intonations, we can produce a transcript of that voice mail – which is really very nice for users in terms of everyday convenience. But it also points to some of what we can achieve with technology, because when you think about using that same technology, say, on videos, for the purposes of search – in terms of being able to search by voice from your phone – there are a lot of things that we can do with that. And we have set applications that explore that already. But I imagine that we will be able to take the technology and weave it even more deeply into what we do.

LESLEY: And is it available? Can I get it right now, today? Is it in beta?

MARISSA: My understanding is that we’re currently in a limited beta. So the service is being offered to subscribers of Grand Central, which is a company that we acquired a few years ago.

LESLEY: Ah, OK. Well let me ask you about another thing that Google introduced last week: something where you get ads based on your personal interests. It’s centered on what they call “behavioral targeting,” where one gets an ad based on places which they had clicked. In other words you would be tracking my moves online, watching the places I visit. It sounds to me like this is the kind of thing that Facebook got in trouble for and had to stop doing. Is it that kind of thing?