Blog:Chrome 25 Beta New Web Speech API (& auto disables some extentions)

[menotu]

From chrome.blogspot

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.

http://chrome.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/hello-browser.html


disable some extensions on Windows


Web Speech API Specification

[menotu]

Paul Sawers - 27 February 2013 - thenextweb

This neat hack takes voice-search to Rdio via Google Chrome’s new Web Speech API

Less than a week after Google launched Chrome 25 replete with voice-recognition support via the new Web Speech API, an interesting little hack has emerged from the Rdio community that taps this very feature.

Talk Radio takes voice-search to Rdio

Talk Radio  takes Siri-esque functionality and replicates it in your browser, letting you request music on Rdio simply by talking.

When you hit the spacebar, the app will ask for permission to access your microphone.

Of course, this is just a proof of concept, and Rdio regularly encourages the developer community to partake in such projects via its API, the idea being they could eventually lead to fully-fledged features, or niche third-party apps.

Apparently, you should also be able to request genres of music, by uttering things like “Play indie pop”, but for me it always misheard what I said.

In addition to Google’s new Web Speech API, Talk Radio also taps The Echo Nest’s (see previous coverage) data-powered search function to arrive at the artist.

This isn’t the fist app to bring voice-search functionality to Rdio – we recently covered an iOS app called Vela Lite, which lets you search for music on Spotify and Rdio simply by saying a song, album or artist.

With the Talk Radio hack, however, this is more a show of technology and successfully demonstrates the all-new Chrome.

Full blog