Google Chrome Gets Speech to Text Recognition

The latest stable release of the Chrome browser (version 11) has a cool new feature: speech input through HTML. This means that you can now talk into your microphone and order commands on websites that support the new speech API. Currently, that’s limited to Google Translate, which is again limited to only voice inputs in the English language.

The use the speech feature first make sure you are using Chrome 11, and that you have a microphone hooked to your computer. Next, go to Google Translate and change the “From” language from “Detect language” to “English”. You should now see a microphone icon appearing at the lower-right corner of the input box.

chrome-speech

Click the microphone icon and speak the sentence you want translated. When you’re done talking, Google will automatically translate the spoken words. You can even click on the “Listen” button to hear the translated words spoken back to you.

Other sites where you can test the new speech feature is Web2Voice and HTML5 demos.

Web2Voice has implemented the HTML5 speech API to create a complete voice controlled interface for searching videos on YouTube and playing them, thus demonstrating how speech-to-text recognition can be used to enhance browsing experience in real life.

On Web2Voice, click on the microphone icon and say aloud the keywords that you want to search on YouTube, like “Source Code trailer”. To play a video say “Play” followed by one or more words from the title of the video you want to play. Say "Stop" to stop the currently playing video and “Play” again to resume it.

As developers begin to embrace HTML5 we can expect to see more and more sites taking advantage of these features.

[via Chrome Blog and Cnet]

This Article Has 2 Comments
  1. Anonymous Reply

    VoicePress.it uses this technology for WordPress Blog posts. Pretty cool.

  2. Anonymous Reply

    I downloaded it and it came with a bunch of things I did not want like weather bug and it even changed my homepage…

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