Newest Chrome Beta Allows Devs to Add Speech Recognition Into Their Apps

[dgstorm]

Here's some intriguing news for developers related to the newest version of Chrome:

Hello Browser
Using your voice to search on your computer or phone is handy, but there’s so much more you can do with voice commands. Imagine if you could dictate documents, have a freestyle rap battle, or control game characters with your browser using only your voice. With today’s Chrome Beta release, this future is closer than you think.

With the inclusion of the Web Speech API for developers, users can start enjoying new, interactive experiences with web apps, like in this demo where you can compose an email by speaking. With this new JavaScript API, developers can integrate speech recognition into their web apps. So, in the near future you’ll be able to talk apps into doing all sorts of things.

To make sure your Chrome installation isn’t being slowed down, today’s Chrome Beta will automatically disable some extensions on Windows that may have been added by third party programs without proper acknowledgement from users. The original intent was to give people an option to add useful extensions when installing applications, but unfortunately this feature has been widely abused by third parties who added extensions without user consent. A notification will appear with the option to re-enable the affected extensions.

Download Chrome Beta to give these latest enhancements a test drive. If you dig APIs more than chocolate cake you can get more details on the Web Speech API and this Chrome release over on the Chromium blog.

Posted by Glen Shires, Software Engineer and Speech Specialist

Source: ChromeForums.net via ChromeBlog