I received a call yesterday from a business student from New York who was interested in hearing my thoughts about a potential acquisition target for Google.

The company he named has been involved in the field of programmatically transcribing spoken word to text for decades.  They've also done a nice job of keeping up with the times, and show some modern web 2.0 sensibilities - no mean feat for a company that's been around more than 30 years. 

To top that off, their web site shows that they own some patents in the area of speech to text.  So, they possess a nice combination of Intellectual Property, leadership in that field.

But does that make them a good acquisition target for a company like Google?  Is there a need for search by phone?  Google did come out with a patent application earlier this year on searching through speech.  A white paper from Google also covers the topic - Searching by Voice (pdf).

Regardless of whether the company in question is one that Google would buy,  it does seem like a natural step for a major search engine to take at some point.