Dec 4, 2010 11:00 GMT  ·  By

While Google isn't buying Groupon, apparently, it's making a couple of smaller acquisitions. Google has just bought Phonetic Arts a company focused on speech synthesis technology. Google hasn't revealed any plans for the technology just yet, it probably doesn't have any concrete ones, but it can be applied to any number of existing products.

"We’ve recently made some strides with speech technologies and tools that take voice input: for example, we launched Voice Search, Voice Input and Voice Actions for mobile phones," Mike Cohen, manager for Speech Technology at Google, said.

"But what about when the computer speaks to you—in other words, voice output? There are already places you can hear this in action today—for example, Google Translate 'speaks' translated text in multiple languages, and you can listen to navigation instructions as you drive," he explains.

"That’s why we’re pleased to announce we’ve acquired Phonetic Arts, a speech synthesis company based in Cambridge, England," he announced.

Google is very interested in speech technology. As the web is becoming more mobile, touch and speech is replacing keyboards. While mobile devices are seeing a surge in usage today, their input capabilities are still rather limited.

But it goes the other way around too, computer speech is a great way of relating information to the user. One obvious application is with navigation systems, Google already has this with Maps Navigation for mobile devices, but there are many others.

And speech generation comes in very handy for people with visual impairments. Entire sites and products could be used and browsed this way.

Phonetic Arts has targeted its technology at game makers until now, but it's safe to assume that it will be diversifying its application once the team joins Google's London engineering operation.

Phonetic Arts is one of the two acquisitions Google announced on the same day, the other being video-on-demand company Widevine.