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Google Releases Chrome 25 With Voice Recognition Support
An anonymous reader writes "Google on Thursday released Chrome version 25 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. While Chrome 24 was largely a stability release, Chrome 25 is all about features, including voice recognition support via the newly added Web Speech API and the blocking of silent extension installation. You can update to the latest release now using the browser's built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome." But if you're more interested in the growing raft of Google-branded hardware than running Google OSes, some good news (via Liliputing) about the newly released Pixel: Bill Richardson of Google posted on Thursday that the Pixel can boot Linux Mint, and explained how users can follow his example, by taking advantage of new support for a user-provided bootloader.
Aside from being '64 bit clean', why would you care about RAM?
Doesn't each Chrome tab run in a separate process, i.e. say each tab addresses 2GB, if you're have 8 tabs open you're maxing out your 16GB workstation??
Running a 32bit browser on a 64bit OS can be a blessing - Running Chrome on Windows means I don't have to disable (for security reasons) the 64bit Java Plugin the JDK installs.
The proposed API itself is agnostic, it just provides a way for a page to ask for mic access and a 'plz speech-to-text-this-audio' mechanism.
Google's implementation, unshockingly enough, phones right back home to the mothership for speech recognition services. I would assume that(if this proposal makes it out of the cradle) implementations will vary: Google will phone home, Apple will 'siri' home, Microsoft might be awfully tempted to phone home on consumer SKUs, but not on enterprise ones; copies of Dragon NaturallySpeaking will probably include a browser plugin that brings your existing recognition training over to web text-to-speech, etc.