> they can now automate gathering information about businesses in bulk without having to rely on any APIs or user supplied info

Besides the business-side run-your-business-like-a-callcenter application, this is the "caller-side" application that's going to make money for Google. The others (virtual personal assistant) have been historically hard to get mass consumers to pay for.

It's straight out of the StreetView playbook... industrialize the scale of data collection, give the results out for free, then monetize the eyeballs (eg more accurate yelp).

Then again, Google ran that free 411 service for a few years that turns out was just a massive natural voice recording data corpus miner...