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HTML5 Speech Recognition (in Chrome)
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- cryptoz 16y agoHTML5 is a lot more than an AJAX/DHTML "rehash". And even if it weren't more than that, you say it like that's a bad thing....it's not! None of that was ever properly standardized, so building a markup language that's standardized across all implementations is extremely valuable. Not to mention, there are numerous important features of HTML5 that you're not thinking about. Geolocation is extremely powerful for the mobile world, which is growing faster than anything else. A web page can - with your permission - read your GPS coordinates and provide you with location-aware information. The combination of WebSockets, WebWorkers and local storage lets devs build sites that more resemble Applications. This is done in an easy and standards-focused way, and not with the hacked-together way that "DHTML" sites were built. Come on...multithreaded Javascript with a socket interface and local storage? Added with location-aware information! HTML5 really is much more than a rehashing of current web tech.
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- varenc 16y agoIs there a speech recognition engine built in to chrome this is leveraging?
- asuth 16y agofrom unscientifically looking at network sent packet counts, it's definitely phoning home for the answer.
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- yanw 16y agoSpeech for HTML Input Elements https://docs.google.com/View?id=dcfg79pz_5dhnp23f5 https://docs.google.com/View?id=dcfg79pz_5dhnp23f5
- varenc 16y agoThat does not specify where the recognition is happening.
- abhikshah 16y agoIf it's anything like speech recognition in Android, it's all server-side..so this should be technically possible in any browser as long as google allows it.
- varenc 16y agoI busted out wireshark to answer my own question. The data is actually getting encoded as speex and being posted to http://www.google.com/speech-api/v1/recognize http://www.google.com/speech-api/v1/recognize . Maybe google is about to open up its speech recognition API to the masses?
- NiekvdMaas 16y agoYou can't see it in the Chrome Developer Tools/Network UI, but the browser is sending the recorded audio input to a webserver. Unfortunately it's HTTPS, so a bit hard to decode the URL/content of the message without using a proxy.
- ciju 16y agoThey are doing post requests to there own servers, for recognition. reference: http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/browser/speech/speech_recognition_request.cc?content-type=text/plain http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/brows... api url: https://www.google.com/speech-api/v1/recognize https://www.google.com/speech-api/v1/recognize
- 51Cards 16y agoI suspect this slide's covert purpose is to make me (yes, just me) sit here and say 'hello' to my computer like a moron for 3 minutes while seeing no effect what-so-ever. In this it has succeeded brilliantly. Running Chrome, mic is on, no one is home... sigh. I so wanted to be wowed.
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- tompagenet2 16y agoYou need to click the little microphone icon - sorry if you've already tried this.
- 51Cards 16y agoInteresting... no Mic icon here. Just a text box centered in the slide. Both in Chrome 7.0.517.44 and Safari 5.0.2. The mystery deepens. Edit: Aha! Update to 8.0.552 and presto... Mic icon. Very slick. Edit again: "Hello" ---> Lowes. "Hello Mr. Webpage" ---> homeless services "This is a test" ---> test Probably a crappy notebook mic to blame. Ah well. Recognition on my Nexus One is quite solid so I can't blame Google's algorithms.
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- gojomo 16y agoWhere does this icon appear? (It's not obvious in the latest Chrome or Safari on MacOS.)
- mrgordon 16y agoThe icon appears in the right of the input box. Appears perfectly on Chrome 8.0.552.215 which my Mac shows is up-to-date.
- codejoust 16y agoWhat version of chrome does this work on? Either I'm missing something or on an older version of chromium: Chromium 5.0.375.127 (Developer Build 55887) Ubuntu 10.04.
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- abhikshah 16y agoWorks on Mac OS with Chromium 10.0.601.0 (68155)
- mrgordon 16y agoChrome 8.0.552.215 also works on Mac.
- jorlow 16y agoI believe it's available in later 7 builds and all dev channel builds after that. Note that it is not yet available in the beta or stable channel builds (since we're still perfecting it). Also, I really recommend you upgrade your Chromium version! I believe security updates are only back-ported to the current stable release, which means you haven't gotten any such updates for a while! (Stable is now at 8.)
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- zmmmmm 16y agoWow, this is pretty intriguing and may actually be a solid differentiator in the browser space since it probably requires a considerable stored database of speech samples coupled with a decent back end server farm to do it effectively. Hard for the other players to replicate. Clever move Google! I wonder if they will add this as a standard feature for any text field at some point? It's probably not going to get much sunlight if it requires a chrome-specific attribute on the field.
- alextgordon 16y agoCouldn't the other browsers yank the code from Chrome and use Google's servers too?
- TomOfTTB 16y agoNot really. I mean, if Google chose to let them than sure. Otherwise it wouldn't be that hard to have Chrome (which is based on an open source project but is not itself open source) send an encrypted key in each packet ensuring it came from a Chrome browser. That said both Microsoft and Apple have voice recognition engines built into their client OS which seems like a much better option latency wise.
- aaronsw 16y agoAnd other browsers could just extract the key and ship it as well.
- TomOfTTB 16y agoI'm assuming there would be some kind of algorithm to generate the encrypted key.
- rryan 16y agoThe algorithm has to be seeded with a secret (Stream ciphers work this way). You can't get around having to have Chome own a secret, and it's really hard to protect a secret when you're in a hostile environment (e.g. the user's PC). This is part of what makes DRM really hard.
- Herring 16y agoI thought speech recognition was still very inaccurate & hasn't improved much in the last 5-10 years. Has it suddenly become usable?
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- rbarooah 16y agoNot for me in this case. Every sentence I tried was mangled in the traditional way: Once upon a time in america -> ants on a time in america The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat. -> the owl and pussycat when to see in a beautiful p cream Google is not evil -> google is evil I'm not joking about that last one.
- reddot 16y agoSpeech recognition has steadily improved over the past 10 years. You can see a few examples: Android system wide speech input, Siri iPhone app (which Apple bought), Dragon Naturally Speaking advertises upwards of 99% accuracy for general purpose dictation, and the latest speech recognition IVRs do pretty darn well; try calling Amtrak or United. If you try to dick around with it, have a strong accent, or are in a noisy environment, you won't get (as) good results. However, as a whole, it's greatly improved.
- ugh 16y agoThat is awesome, works even for German without a problem. I couldn’t get it to recognize an English sentence properly (which probably only means that my English pronunciation is horrible). I’m wondering, however, how they manage to recognize the language in the three word sentences I tried.
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- 27182818284 16y agoA lot of it is statistical inference. I've run into weird glitches where it chooses the completely wrong word that still fits. For example I used a sentence that ended with "cool!" but it transcribed it to "excellent!" Obviously, "excellent" sounds nothing like "cool" but the sentence still worked because it was using the neighboring words to try and guess what should go there.
- ugh 16y agoIf speech recognition can with some accuracy identify the language of speech after only three words it already exceeds my own capabilities. Whenever I truly don’t know which language someone is going to talk to me I nearly always need more than three words to orient myself. That’s why I’m so impressed.
- zmanian 16y agoTwo things I would want upon seeing this. 1. Chrome extension to use speech recognition in every text box. 2. Speech recognition inside the google apps: Gmail, etc.
- dannytatom 16y agohttps://github.com/dannytatom/speak-it https://github.com/dannytatom/speak-it Right now it turns any text input into a speech input, but I might change that later. Or, at least, have an option to disable it on certain sites (have never created a chrome extension, no clue how long that'd take).
- seancron 16y agoShucks, you beat me to it, and with a better name too. Congratulations for being quick on the draw. I'm going to fork it and help work on it.
- dannytatom 16y agoHeh, I had nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon. :P
- Sephr 16y ago<input x-webkit-speech> works for me, so you may want to just apply the attribute to all input elements regardless of type (and textarea elements for future support). I suspect that support for voice input on input types such as date may also be added eventually. Edit: More at the HTML5 speech input proposal at https://docs.google.com/View?id=dcfg79pz_5dhnp23f5#y1f9 https://docs.google.com/View?id=dcfg79pz_5dhnp23f5#y1f9 . It's apparent from this that you should also use the attribute on select elements too. I also can get x-webkit-speech working in current stable Chrome with an input type of speech.
- dannytatom 16y agoThanks for the link, I've went ahead and made it work on any input field and text area that isn't in the not allowed list.
- bajsejohannes 16y agoIt actually does a pretty good job at simple words and sentences. So, jumping in the deep end, I tried "The reflected binary code was originally designed to prevent spurious output from electromechanical switches". Can anyone get it to recognize that? I did manage to get it to respond correctly to every word by itself (sometimes only after a couple of tries), but not the whole thing. (non-native speaker)
- zain 16y agoCalifornian here, and it was really close on my first try: the reflected binary code was originally designed to prevent spurious output from electrode mechanical switches I'm kinda blown away. Here's an mp3 of what I sound like, if anyone is curious: http://cl.ly/3WDv http://cl.ly/3WDv
- bajsejohannes 16y agoThanks for this. From now on Chrome will be the judge of how clearly and accent free I speak :)
- defen 16y ago"reflected by originally designed the spirit outlet switches" "side by side spirit album auto mechanic" "reflective vinyl ether design factory outlet switches" I'm from New Jersey.
- sandipagr 16y agowow this is really good. It recognizes almost everything and I am not even a native speaker.
- ImJasonH 16y agoDid anybody check out the slide before this, device orientation? http://slides.html5rocks.com/#slide23 http://slides.html5rocks.com/#slide23 That's pretty awesome too, I could see this being great for mobile web apps, especially games.
- Raphael 16y agoPity the Android browser ignores URL fragments.
- grigory 16y agoThis worked great on my aging macbook. That's just amazing, I had no idea it came with sensors to support such functionality.
- ImJasonH 16y agoAll Apple laptops since 2006 have had a sudden motion sensor to detect when the laptop is falling and lock the hard drive platters in place to prevent damage. Apple exposes this to software basically just because they can, AFAIK. And to support cool features like this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_Motion_Sensor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_Motion_Sensor
- newhouseb 16y agoYeah, though support is pretty limited though and worst of all, the axis are not standard and so there needs to be branches for basically every sensor/computer configuration to ensure Y+ is up and X+ is right. Coming from iOS land it's exciting until you realize it's going to be tricky to do widespread. Here's to hoping it improves soon though!
- ImJasonH 16y agoAw, curse words are censored? That's pretty ####### lame.
- bajsejohannes 16y agoIndeed. I hope they did it to not accidentally offend people by falsely recognizing a swear word. If so, they would probably be better of taking the non-swear neighbor word.
- gilaniali 16y agoHow are they accessing my laptop mic? Is it the Google voice plugin? Shouldn't the browser ask for permission before allowing access?
- bemmu 16y agoBecause it's a Chrome feature? x-webkit-speech
- gojomo 16y agoThey're considering clicking the microphone icon permission. (You did have to click the icon, didn't you?)
- johnswamps 16y agoHm, I wonder if it's susceptible to clickjacking
- nkassis 16y agoGood point. This could be easily use for spying. Next up wikileaks will use this when government IPs are discovered on the site ;p
- varenc 16y agoIts also a little concerning that google is sending this data to its own servers without warning. GOOG-411 at least warned you it was a collection tool.
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- bemmu 16y agoVaries from poor to amazing. "I have met Jesus, he was a nice guy" -> "ice melt cheese" "hacker news is amazing" -> "hacker news" "are you afraid of santa claus?" 100% correct "if a woodchuck could chuck wood how much wood would a woodchuck chuck" 100% correct
- wildmXranat 16y agoIt was rather good, but not even close to rely on it for anything practical. It felt a bit like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FFRoYhTJQQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FFRoYhTJQQ
- nowarninglabel 16y ago"Hack the planet" -> "Mayo clinic" You win this round Google.
- mdxch 16y agoI whipped up a Chrome extension for voice search if anyone is interested: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1047706/VoiceSearch.crx http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1047706/VoiceSearch.crx https://github.com/raneath/chrome-voice-search https://github.com/raneath/chrome-voice-search
- GeneralMaximus 16y agoThis is exactly like the speech recognition on Android. It works brilliantly with short phrases that also happen to be popular searches on Google (or Google Voice Search) but fails at longer or obscure sentences. It's all about the data, baby. I use Voice Search heavily on my Desire, but I prefer to type out my communications because of this exact limitation.
- colanderman 16y agoWhy does this have anything to do with HTML5 -- isn't it up to the UA to determine how best to accept form input? Specifying in the form that a particular field is a "voice recognition" field seems to be encoding presentation details in what should be structure. I can understand that it's important to mark a particular form field as more "important" than others (and thus more likely that a user would like to use their voice to input text to it), but wouldn't this be better served by semantic markup declaring the field as a "primary" field or some such?