Google buys UK-based speech technology company Phonetic Arts

Internet giant Google yesterday made its 25th acquisition this year by buying UK-based speech synthesis software maker Phonetic Arts, for an undisclosed sum.

Google, which was last week rebuffed by online discount start up site Groupon by reportedly walking away from its $6-billion takeover offer (See: Groupon walks away from Google's $6-bn takeover offer), acquired Phonetic Arts in order to boost the voice functionality of its mobile apps.

Founded in 2006, Phonetic Arts is a speech synthesis company based in Cambridge that provides modern speech technology to computer games. It specialises in speech synthesis, and delivers natural speech for a computer, generated from small samples of recorded voice.

Its product suite, PA 2010, has been developed in partnership with many leading game studios to provide the best possible speech solutions to the games industry.

Mike Cohen, manager of Speech Technology at Google, wrote in a blog post, ''There's a particular focus right now in the UK on technology and innovation, and we're delighted to be deepening our investment in the country with this acquisition. We already have a strong engineering centre in London and look forward to welcoming Phonetic Arts to the team.''

''We are excited about their technology, and while we don't have plans to share yet, we're confident that together we'll move a little faster towards that Star Trek future.''

Cohen said that Google has recently made improvements with speech technologies and tools that take voice input by launching Voice Search, Voice Input and Voice Actions on Android mobile phones and automatic speech-to-text caption transcription on YouTube.