
On Firefox 4 Day, Chrome 11 Hits Beta With The Ability To Talk To Your Computer - bkudria
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/22/chrome-11-beta/
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fourspace
Sadly, my computer still doesn't respond when I say "Computer, make me a
sandwich." (Yes, I tried sudo.)

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ubermoe
Making a sandwitch is hard for a computer, I think you should ask for a glass
of water.

~~~
younata
Upvoted because you gave me my next project. A robot that makes sandwiches,
and serves me glasses of water.

~~~
fourspace
Please, please, please name it Alfred.

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Jabbles
I think the ability to automatically update people's browsers is an extremely
valuable weapon of Google's. Compared to the slow, manual releases of FF and
IE, Google surely has the advantage that new features will be seen by the
public earlier on Chrome than elsewhere.

Does anyone know of Mozilla or Microsoft having any intention of switching to
a more continuous release cycle?

(I believe Google uses <http://code.google.com/p/omaha/> to push their updates
out - quite a fascinating piece of software.)

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lucasf
There was a thread (AMA) with Firefox guys on reddit last week, and
continuous/fast release cycle is one of things that they want to focus on now.
They want to start using it this year.

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geuis
Has anyone found a way to either A) Activate the mic control from javascript
or B) Enable continuous recording once the user has initiated recording?

I understand the security implications of A. However, B would be an acceptable
alternative since the user initiates it. I'm imaging a vocal interface that
requires minimal user keyboard interaction.

I found an attribute called "continue", but it doesn't seem to do anything
special when added to the input element.

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pippy
If you looked at the image you'd notice it's simply an HTML tag. I'd assume
the data wouldn't be accessible with javascript.

It's the way it should be, just imagine the vulnerabilities having js enabled
microphones would have.

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FirstHopSystems
I talk to my computer all the time, never needed Chrome.

~~~
light3
I tend to curse my computer a lot for reading my programs wrongly.

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bkudria
Actually kinda cool.

Does anyone actually use Voice Control on an iPhone, or any other speech
recognition tech? I've never seen it used in real life except in IVR systems.

~~~
Lewisham
I've tried to use it on my Android phone, but it hates my English accent. If I
talk to it in a borderline-racist American accent, it does better, but not
enough for me to actually get anything done.

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jokermatt999
As an American, I don't think I've ever seen anyone offended by an attempt at
an American accent. I actually find it hilarious to hear British people
attempting an American accent, because it's one of the rare times you can
actually get a sense of what your own accent sounds like. The minor
differences are accentuated when someone tries hard, and it's much easier to
notice them.

Back on topic, didn't Google roll something about Voice Command customization
out a while ago? I'd been using it when I can so it would "learn", but I guess
that's pointless if it doesn't. It does seem to have gotten better for me
since the start, but I don't know if that's personalization or just Google
improving it. I mostly use it for searching or dialing, so I can't speak for
its accuracy at longer commands like texting, however.

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Sephr
I created a Voice Search Chrome extension back when Chrome first received
speech input functionality that may interest some of you. It's on the Chrome
Web Store at
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hhfkcobomkalfdlmko...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hhfkcobomkalfdlmkongnhnhahkmnaad)

~~~
TryThinking
hey i tried this out quickly. pretty good. two thoughts:

1) is it me, or does it take two clicks to go from the plugin icon to actually
accepting voice input?

2) android's voice search has both visual and audible cues to indicate to the
user that it's actually picking up your speech, finished, and is now thinking
about it. that'd be excellent.

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Sephr
1\. To initiate speech input, there needs to be direct user interaction on
that microphone icon. I wish there was a way for extensions to initiate it
manually.

2\. This is a bug in Chrome due to the extension rendering in a popup bubble
and the usual speech indicator also being in a popup bubble, but it won't
render as only one popup bubble at a time can be displayed.

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lukeschlather
>If you’re running Chrome 11, you can try it out here. It works very well. You
speak, and the browser is able to transcribe what you say. No Flash, no plug-
in. Yep. Awesome.

Is this still making requests to Google's servers to do the transcription?
Personally I think I'll take the resource-hungry plugin over a web API.

Well, on a computer. On a phone, cloud voice input is fantastic.

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mcritz
Does Chrome 11 support h.264 <video>?

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drivebyacct2
11.0.696.16 dev played back an H.264 video. Yes.

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MatthewPhillips
Does the speech recognition computation happen in the browser code, or do they
send the voice bits to their Google servers which translates it into text and
then send it back to the browser?

The latter is how voice recognition works on Android, and why it only works
when you have an active internet connection. It seems a little weird to me to
build an html5 standard that requires server side computation. How is a non-
profit open source browser going to fund the massive server load needed, not
to mention the R&D needed to develop a voice-to-text translator? Google’s
stuff is proprietary.

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Tichy
Seems rather random to me. Amusingly, when I said "Munich" it understood "New
York" - so perhaps somehow it already realized it is a city :-)

I have had a Nexus One for over a year now, and all the speech recognition
does is annoy me if I accidentally hit the microphone icon and have to cancel
it.

To be fair, I am not a native speaker of English, maybe it works better for
native speakers.

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ubermoe
I have been a hardcore Firefox user and fan but Chrome was something I was
really looking for. A browser with no confusing colors, hundreds of extensions
and more.

I downloaded Firefox 4 and I liked it but after a couple of minutes I didn't
resist not going back to Chrome.

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kaddar
I've been working on a plugin using the new sidebar extensions api, and I'm
pretty sure this update broke the api :( Planning to file a ticket in the
chromium bug tracker soon.

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gmurphy
I made this quick demo of using it for wikipedia search using a bunch of
different public APIs: <http://bodytag.org/perch/>

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meadhikari
Oh! IE is just 9. Firefox is just 4 and we have Chrome ELEVEN.

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jister
In this day and age, I feel weird talking to my computer alone in my office.

