Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Voice Search in Google Chrome

If you are a smart phone user, you would have definitely tried any one of the “Voice Search” applications. Voice Search provides a method  to search by speaking to your device. I use “Voice actions” on my Android quite extensively and it is very useful to me. Now, there is a Chrome extension to get the same functionality on Google Chrome browser as well. The extension is still under development and you can’t expect it to be 100% perfect.

Voice Search Chrome extension Voice Search Options

Voice Search icon on Google search box  

Voice Search Chrome extension

  • Install “Voice Search” extension by pointing your Chrome to this URL.
  • If you are using Chrome 9 or higher, you may need to explicitly enable speech input. To do so, start your Chrome instance by setting the flag “--enable-speech-input”. It will be enabled by default on Windows. If you are on Mac or Linux, you can use this flag to enable speech input.
  • Whenever you visit any of the popular services, you will find a small microphone (like the one shown in the screenshot above) in the search box. Default services: Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, WolframAlpha. It also works with any website using HTML5 search boxes.
  • Click on the microphone icon and start speaking. The extension will recognize the search terms and will populate the search box. Note: The extension is still under development. So, don’t be surprised if it gives out totally irrelevant text.
  • You can enable voice search on your favorite site by adding the same from the options page.

-- Varun

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