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.
