Google has announced that the latest beta version of its Chrome web browser adds support for the HTML5 speech input API. That means developers can write web apps that will convert speech to text, allowing you to interact with a web page by speaking into your computer’s microphone.
The technology could let you search a web page, translate from English to French, or perform any number of other actions using your voice.
We’ve seen some pretty cool speech recognition features show up in mobile app form over the last few years. While talking to a desktop computer still seems like something out of Star Trek, it should be interesting to see what type of web apps appear to take advantage of the new capability.