Looks like we may be ‘talking to’ Google sooner than we might have thought? I say this as Google registers a voice-activated patent of their very own.

A newly published patent provides further evidence that Google is developing a voice-activated search engine.

Patent number 7027987, of which Google is the assignee, concerns “a voice interface for search engines. Through the use of a language model, phonetic dictionary and acoustic models, a server generates an n-best hypothesis list or word graph.”

Though the patent was only published this week, the application was originally filed in February 2001, indicating that Google has had the project in the works for some time.

A demo of something called Google Voice Search has been up on Google Labs, Google’s pre-beta-test site, for well over a year.

Craig Silverstein, the director of technology at Google, said in a 2004 interview, that the company envisioned a voice interface to aid in everything from driving directions to finding groceries in a supermarket.

But a Google spokesman cautioned against reading too much into the publication of the patent this week…. Source: Silicon.com