Google acquires Phonetic Arts to make software voices more realistic

Google has announced that it's acquired Phonetic Arts, a UK-based company that synthesizes voices for games. Phonetic Arts has software that can convert recordings of a human voice into a pretty accurate automated voice, which has plenty of applications outside the gaming world. Sounds like a good match for Google, which does a lot of voice recognition -- in Google Voice voicemail and YouTube auto-captions, for example -- but hasn't spent as much time on the voices that read things back to you.

This is a definite sign that we can expect more of our Google products to talk to us in the future, and that they'll sound more human when they do.

Tags: acquisition, google, phonetic arts, PhoneticArts, speech, voice, voice synthesis, VoiceSynthesis