On Wednesday we looked at Google Chrome 11 beta and all its new great features, and now there is already an extension for it; that was pretty quick! Its name is Speechify and this is an extension that requires to have installed Google Chrome 11 beta, that hopefully soon will be in the stable channel, and it takes the power of HTML5 to provide speech-to-text capabilities for many Websites.
Now, when you install Speechify in Chrome 11+ you will notice in many Websites you visit, that the search boxes will have a little gray microphone icon positioned on the right, and when you click the icon, it will turned blue and a Speak now box with a volume indicator will appear, then you will be able to speak a search term that you are looking for instead of typing it — the translation of speech-to-text does not happen locally in your computer, when you speak the voice gets packed and shipped to Google cloud for analysis and then it will return as a text output, so as you can see it is pretty fast–. With Speechify you will be able to use voice in many Websites, like Google and Bing, Hulu, YouTube, Amazon, and many others.
Right now you might be asking yourself, does it really work? And the short answer is, it depends; the extension itself works, also remember that this Google Chrome Extension still in beta, so it is going to be buggy for a while, and there is also a known issue for Quora search. Now the speech recognition it may take a little bit of practice to get it right, for example, in a test I said “cars” and Speechify returned “call”, when I said “Google” Speechify returned “Google”, for single words seems to work OK, when you are trying full sentence or phrases that is where it can get a little bit complicated.
If you have installed Google Chrome 11, you may have noticed that speech input isn’t enable by default, but don’t worry we got you covered, check this article to enable speech input in Chrome 11!
What do you thing about Speechify? What could be the better implementation for a feature like this? Be the first to leave a comment in the section below. Thanks!
Mauro Huculak is a Windows expert and the Editor-in-Chief who started Pureinfotech in 2010 as an independent online publication. He's also been a Windows Central contributor for nearly a decade. Mauro has over 12 years of experience writing comprehensive guides and creating professional videos about Windows, software, and related technologies, including Android and Linux. Before becoming a technology writer, he was an IT administrator for seven years. In total, Mauro has over 20 years of combined experience in technology. Throughout his career, he achieved different professional certifications from Microsoft (MSCA), Cisco (CCNP), VMware (VCP), and CompTIA (A+ & Network+), and he has been recognized as a Microsoft MVP for many years. You can follow him on X (Twitter), YouTube, and LinkedIn.