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.

Comments

Clever!

[Austerity Empowers]

I see what you did there, this is social engineering. Who is going to shout at their monitor "Natalie Portman grits petrified porn"?

Fappist: "Natalie Portman grits petrified porn"
            Chrome: "Madly norman sits petrified corn"
            Fappist: "NATALIE PORTMAN GRITS PETRIFIED PORN"
            Chrome: "Actually foreman knits electrified morn"
            FAPPIST: "GRRRRR! NATALIE PORTMAN GRITS PETRIFIED PORN!!!!"
           

Re:voice recognition is a bad joke

[Albanach]

There are only two things voice recognition is useful for:
* taking a small number of distinct commands
* producing nonsense poetry that keeps rhythm and rhyme with input voice

That's funny, I used voice control of my Nexus 4 yesterday evening to open the email application, pick the correct contact and then dictate an email along the lines of:

Hi _name_,

I've just left work. I'll be home in about ten minutes.

See you then,

_my name_

That certainly seems to be more than a small number of commands. Okay, I'm not going to dictate War and Peace, but it's certainly functional.

Re:Where is voice recognition being done

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:Does it have decent ad blocking yet?

[flyingfsck]

Since Google is an ad company, you are going to sleep for a looong time dude.