Mountain View, California – With the rise of Siri, the future of Web browsing has finally dawned! Barely days after releasing Chrome 24 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Google surprised the tech industry on Monday by announcing the release of Chrome 25 beta. With the latest release, the company is giving developers some big new voice-centered tools among the new features, which consists of voice support via the newly added Web Speech API, a new tab page with a search box, and the blocking of silent extension installation.
While you will likely be able to speak to and be clearly understood by most of your gadgets in the distant future, but presently Google’s Chrome browser updating with a new Web Speech API delivers a lot of pretty obvious applications for the functionality, which will eventually allow Chrome users to dictate search queries, documents, and other text inputs.
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Expounding on the functionality of this release, Google speech expert and software engineer Glen Shires pretty well sums up what this means when he says: “Using your voice to search on your computer or phone is pretty straightforward, but there is 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.”
In fact, this release is updated to deliver on everything from game control to text dictation-you will no longer have to type outside your browser with systems like Dragon Dictate to keep your fingers in check-though they might just adopt Google’s friendliness here, too. However, this release of Chrome beta does not automatically recognize speech from the browser itself, but through apps and web-pages that have already taken advantage of the API.
Admittedly, these minor functionality could be a reality in future versions of Chrome, opening the door to features like composing an email via the spoken word. The function is expected to eventually embed into options like dictating searches, documents, and other text input.
“The original intent was to give people an option to add useful extensions when installing applications,” Shires said. “But unfortunately this feature has been widely abused by third parties who added extensions without user consent.”
In addition, a number of other features and tools were added to the update, including the Resource Timing API for detailed timing information on JavaScript, and Chrome Developer Tools that help debug the Web.
While there is not much new ground being broken there, it is still considered a big deal, and it would not be long until developers figure out other, more interesting uses for the new voice API.
Last week, Google rolled out a new release of Chrome for Android. If you are interested in using the web-page shown in the video below, you can do so here.
To get a better idea of how Chrome’s voice recognition will look, watch the video below.
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