Google Hope For Star Trek Future

Google reported another acquisition last week, to help them bring their Star Trek visionary concept to life. The acquired company, Phonetic Art, specialises in speech synthesis and Google hope to utilise it to enhance its voice output services. Google aims to integrate the technology into its products and services, to translate text to speech and address users with a more natural voice.

Google's speech technology manager explains that the concept and desire originates from Star Trek. He explains that "...in Star Trek, they don't spend a lot of time typing things on keyboards-they just speak to their computers, and the computers speak back," he says. "We're confident that together [with Phonetic Arts] we'll move a little faster towards that Star Trek future."

Phonetic Arts based in Cambridge, focuses on building technology that create expressive speech more humanly toned for computerised products. Meaning they specialise in creating features to make computers speak any text in any voice.

A Google product, which would benefit from this acquisition, is Google Translate. It is already equipped with the capability of translating text to speech, however with Phonetic Art advanced expertise; we at Pipon Solutions believe this could push the limitation it holds.
Additionally, it is possible Google could utilise this to translate Google search to a more interact multimedia platform, similar to Qwiki.com