It seems like the whole speech industry is just a titter with acquisitions and buyouts these days. The big are getting too-big-to-fail, and the small are getting sucked up like plankton through baleen. Heck, it’s not even the small these days. Just in the last two weeks, we saw Nuance gobbling up patents and licenses from IBM like a fat king on a turkey leg and SVOX gorging itself on Siemens’ speech unit.

Back in December, Roberto Pieraccini from SpeechCycle told me that mergers and acquisitions were happening so fast that even he couldn’t keep track of them.

So far, a lot of the action has been all within the confines of the speech world, but all these acquisitions got me and my brother Adam B. thinking about Japan. So often the Japanese see mergings of the two unlikeliest companies: the Lucky toothpaste company and Goldstar electronics firm to form LG; the Yamaha musical instrument company buying up a motorcycle manufacturer to form the perplexing giant we all know today; or even good ol’ Nintendo, which sold card games in the 60s, but branched out to run a chain of “love hotels” and a cab company.

We were wondering, what if the same happened in speech? What if speech just trounced all over sensible vertical market expansion? What would be some unlikely mergers we’d like to see? Dare we imagine? Yes. We dare.

Behold, Speech Heads! The 2009 Speech Technology Dream Team-Ups:

1.)    Nuance merges with the New Balance shoe corporation to form Nuance Balance.

Nuance will be looking to expand their reach, and this one just made the most horse sense in the world; sympathetic corporate cultures, practically rhyming names, the growing need for a top-rate, speech-enabled shoe corporation. Have you ever been running a cross-country meet and just felt an overwhelming compulsion to dictate your memoirs? Wish away fruitlessly no more. Nuance Balance has a solution for that.

2.)     Avaya acquires Dairy Queen in a hostile take over.

Avaya more or less lets Dairy Queen continue as its own separate brand, but begins incorporating free ice cream into its IVR call-routing systems.

Imagine this, as a caller becomes frustrated with a system, unable to get the service he desires, but rather than being transferred to a domain’s underpaid operator who will likely hand him off to someone else in the domain who can’t help him, he is instead routed to a free and delicious DQ Blizzard—vanilla blended with Oreos! Talk about tasty CRM; that caller has probably just forgotten the outstanding payment he was calling about in the first place. Banking error in this domain’s favor…

3.)    Nexidia buys up the controlling shares of the WWE wrestling corporation.

You know those long-winded monologues wrestlers deliver before a big fight? The ones where they swear to break this, and smash that, and clothesline a fella so hard his ancestors will feel it in organs they weren’t aware they even had? Those little pep talks are all very theatrical and great fun—we know that—but there’s not a whole lot of accountability in them is there? Who knows if the promised pile-driver Macho Man Randy Savage menaced on a Monday Night Raw is delivered to Nature Boy Rick Flair on a Tuesday Night Titans? Well, prepare for a new era of accountability.

In this dream match-up, Nexidia applies its video search tech on-the-fly to WWE events; tagging and tying the pain a wrestler guaranteed outside the ring to his actions in the ring. A ticker at the bottom of your screen lets you know in real time if wrestler Jimmy “The Mouth of the South” Hart is delivering on that smackdown he promised last week.

4.)    SpeechCycle acquires the patent to the Foreman Grill.

Not satisfied with the mixed results of traditional consumer grilling, SpeechCycle decided that it was time to provide world consumers with the grilled food they’ve longed for, at least statistically speaking. Using their data-driven approach, the SpeechCycle Foreman Grill uses aggregated data to provide us with the median steak of our collective dreams.

Just put your dinner in and the grill does the rest. In order to ensure the best results, the device is constantly acquiring data based on a number of metrics. The grill is speech-enabled to recognize utterances like: mmm, tasty, delicious, or ugh, putrid, and This is the most foul meal I’ve known in all my years. If you aren’t satisfied with your meal, don’t blame SpeechCycle. Blame the sum total of human desire.

5.)    PerSay partners with the Cornell University Department of Animal Husbandry.

Looking to patch a number of glaring security problems (the recent theft of several heads of cattle; the spate of sabotage that has hit a number of Cornell’s beasts of burden, including a prize ox; and the vandalism of two dozen carrier pigeons) Cornell gives the Israeli biometric giant, PerSay, administrative control of its department.

PerSay overhauls Cornell’s stable of animals, limiting access to only authorized users who can pass their 96 percent effective voice verification process. After implementation, the department sees a drastic cut in its farm-crime rates; however, some problems do persist. University investigators find that the acts of sabotage were actually being carried out by Animal Husbandry faculty. An inside job! Arrests are made and one, Professor Newman Von Heidleborg, the ring leader, is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.