From the 'Dragon Dictation' files:
Not content to let Mozilla developers have their day in the sun with the big Firefox 4 release, Google has upped the ante in the browser wars with Chrome 11 Beta.
While many of the recent Chrome releases have primarily focused on performance gains, Chrome 11 offers users a feature that none of us have ever seen built into a browser before.
Chrome 11 supports the HTML5 speech input API.That's right, speech input - the keyboard isn't the only way to get data into your browser anymore.
"With this API, developers can give web apps the ability to transcribe your voice to text," Google wrote in a blog post. "When a web page uses this feature, you simply click on an icon and then speak into your computer's microphone. The recorded audio is sent to speech servers for transcription, after which the text is typed out for you."
The potential for this technology is staggering.
From the basic IVR (Interactive Voice Response), to accessibility and beyond, the speech input API marks the evolution of the web as a human accessible platform.
In a quick test (using the Google demo with Chrome 11.0.696.16 dev), I can vouch for the fact that the technology does work, though it's not perfect.
It is something however that is really exciting. I'd love for Google to fully voice enable browser navigation as well. Heck why not enable Google Docs too?
Going a step further, since this is based on an HTML5 spec, it's not inconceivable that other browser vendors could jump on this bandwagon too (and I sure hope they do). Though it is just the API that is open and someone (in this case Google) needs to provide the actual speech servers, but I suspect over time that will become a common service.
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