"In the future, we’d like to improve our search quality by applying machine-learning, artificial intelligence and information retrieval techniques to problems such as:
- Extraction of structured information from the web
- Information synthesis (by pulling partial information from multiple documents to fulfill an information need)
- Learning of semantic concepts and using this to improve search
- Automatic development of vertical search services
- Answering of natural language queries
- Automatic machine-translation between language pairs
"
This underlines where Google wants to improve and grow moving forward. Looking at these bullet points, I’m wondering when someone (possibly Google itself, since they forbid automated querying) will plug a text-to-speech service on top of their engine.