Facebook will now pay you to say things in order to teach its Portal devices

We’ve all heard about or even experienced ourselves cases of ads being targeted at us based on something we’ve only talked about privately. Facebook is usually involved in such stories and with the company’s privacy record, it’s not that surprising.

But while listening to people talking is a good way to learn things about them, it’s not so useful if you want to hear something very specific. And if you want people to do that, you have to give them an incentive.

And Facebook is doing just that. The company has added a new feature to its Viewpoints app, the Verge reports. The app allows users to complete certain tasks and gather points that can be redeemed for money.

Now, there’s a new program called “Pronunciations” and as the name suggests, its purpose is to gather a bunch of different pronunciations. But not of just any phrases, Facebook is interested in accumulating a database of people saying “Hey Portal” and the name of one of their friends. Portal is the name of Facebook’s video-chat-oriented smart display, in case you haven’t heard of it.

Eligible participants will be able to record the phrase using up to 10 different first names. For your hard work, you’ll be rewarded with 200 points in the app, 1,000 points being the least you can exchange for money and get $5. Basically, for one set of recordings, you’ll get $1.

Some users will be able to repeat the exercise 5 different times, however, which will bring them right to that minimum. Even $5 probably doesn’t sound much to you, but anyone that’s been on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk knows it’s not a bad deal for the amount of work required.

To participate, users must be from the US and have at least 75 Facebook friends. If you fit in that description and feel like helping Facebook out for some hard cash, go right ahead and download the Viewpoints app. For some reason, we can’t imagine many people doing it.