Chrome Beta Gets Voice Dictation Support (Video)

Soon, you will be able to craft emails in Google Chrome using only your voice. Google updated the beta feed of its Chrome browser Monday with developer support for the Web Speech API.

The Web Speech API is a JavaScript API that lets web developers integrate speech recognition into their websites and web apps.

Google Chrome has had support for voice search for quite some time but as the Google Chrome blog points out, more robust dictation support could open up a lot of other opportunities.

Google built a demo showcasing the new API support in the new Chrome Beta that lets users compose an email using their voice.

I tested out the feature and was very impressed. Despite being on horribly laggy hotel Wi-Fi, the API worked well and was mostly accurate and fairly fast at understanding my voice.

Here's the text output of my voice dictation (which you can watch in the video above):

This is a test of Google's web Speech API even know my hotel Internet is notoriously slow I can still dictate what I'm thinking fairly quickly the accuracy is not 100 percent and noticed some problems with the speech to text recognition but I'm a hole for beta

Aside from confusing "though" with "know" and getting slow at the end, it's not bad.

Because this API is JavaScript-based, it's something we can see working its way down to Chrome for Android — and maybe even Chrome for iOS. I know I'd love to record an interview but also have it auto-transcribe to Google Docs on my phone.

Apple added some similar built-in dictation features to OS X Mountain Lion, which works in almost any app or open text field. I can only imagine that Google will be bringing this feature to its Chromebooks in a future update.

If you want to get in on the fun or start building support for the Web Speech API in your own sites, check out this article on HTML5 Rocks and download the Chrome Beta here.

 

 

Source : mashable