New York — For years, Google has been at the forefront of the speech recognition technology movement. Furthering its investment in voice interaction, the search engine behemoth Google on Friday said that it is beefing up its voice services with a fresh acquisition of Cambridge, U.K.-based maker of speech synthesis software startup blog.
The company is characterizing the deal as a move toward Star Trek-style voice interaction with computers. Google’s view is that voice will be critical in making mobile devices with small screens and keyboards more useful. Already, it has unleashed a number of services that allows people to use their voice to conduct a Web search, compose emails, play songs on a phone or get directions.
Hence, this acquisition would enormously help the search engine giant to enhance its Google Translate platform as well as build text-to-speech functionality into other products, including its Android mobile operating system.
However, Google has yet to achieve any major breakthroughs in area of voice output, where computers speak back to users. Hopefully, this acquisition of Phonetic Arts paves way in reversing the situation — when the computer speaks to you, a.k.a. voice output, the company said in a blog post.
Phonetic Arts Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Phonetic Arts will be joining Google’s engineering center in London.
In a blog post, Mike Cohen, manager of speech technology at Google, observes that Google has already made significant advancement by embracing speech input into its products. He indicated at Voice Search, Voice Input, and Voice Actions on Android mobile phones and automatic speech-to-text caption transcription on YouTube.
“In Star Trek, they do not spend a lot of time typing things on keyboards — they just speak to their computers, and the computers speak back,” Cohen, wrote in a company blog.
“We are thrilled about their technology, and while we do not have any plans to share yet, we are optimistic that together we will advance a bit faster towards that Star Trek future,” he concluded.
Voice interaction is a blooming field. There are safe-driving applications that speak your text messages to you, so you can keep your eyes on the road, and Google’s own translation “speaks” text in multiple languages. Currently, Nuance Communications is one of the leaders in the voice-recognition space.
The company’s application is now employed by video game makers to build “expressive and responsive dialog” in their games, but the search engine giant indicated in its announcement that it could probably be used in some of its products, including Google Translate, which can read translations of text out loud, as well as the turn-by-turn navigation feature built into the mobile version of Google Maps.
Currently, Phonetic Arts concentrates on creating software that converts inputted text into natural, very realistic sounding computer speech. While the Cambridge-based tech startup has concentrated most of its efforts over the last few years in the video gaming space, its speech synthesis software is designed to produce synthetic speech that does not sound robotic.
Google is sure to use the company’s technology and expertise to create a more interactive experience for users of its search engine and mobile phone OS. Clicking on the Listen button for a phrase generated by Phonetic Arts was established four-years ago, according to this write-up in a British business weekly, but it unveiled its product suite just a year ago. It has apparently gained accolades and a client roster that includes Electronic Arts and ZeniMax Media. Google says Phonetic Arts’ team of researchers and engineers will focus on making the interactions less robotic and more natural by using small samples of recorded voice.
Google’s commitment to speech should not be seen as an abandonment of keyboard-based input, however. Just two months ago, Google acquired Blind Type, a developer of software-based keyboard technology for touch-typing on mobile phones. Furthermore, Google also mentioned that part of its reasoning behind acquiring Phonetic Arts was to establish a greater presence in the London’s thriving technology market.
This acquisition of Phonetic Arts is Google’s 25th this year.