Google Acquires Phonetic Arts Makes its 25th Acquisition of the Year

This Friday, Google announced, extending their investments in voice interaction region, they had acquired Phonetic Arts, a U.K.-based maker of speech synthesis software. Whereas, Phonetic Arts has also affirmed this deal as it posted a confirmation on their official Web site. This has now given Google a very unique varied opportunity to incorporate Phonetic Arts speech synthesis technology with their variety of products and services itself.

Once again, no further details were disclosed, especially in regard to the financial matter as well. However, his blog post, the manager of speech technology at Google, Mike Cohen, has expressed that Google has already made noteworthy attempts to integrate and utilize speech input into its products. He points to Voice Search, Voice Input, and Voice Actions on Android mobile phones and more prominently the automatic speech-to-text caption transcription on YouTube a well.

It is assumable that voice interaction is beginning to have a very noticeable positive impact on Google's advertising revenue too. The company had launched the voice search for mobile function, almost two years ago and as a result now almost a quarter of the total search queries of entire Google database for Android devices is spoken. Perhaps by the time, users might be expected to be able to receive search results and ads as speech too.

This acquisition of purchasing Phonetic Arts will be, or rather is, Google's 25th acquisition of year, whereas if you consider the rumors of Google's offer to buy Groupon has been accepted, then it just might be the 26th one.