Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Google building speech capabilities for browsers

news
May 25, 20102 mins

Company wants its technology to become standard for the Web and envisions a whole new class of applications

Google technologists are hopeful that speech capabilities they are developing for browsers could serve as industry-standard technology.

The company is developing voice recognition and text-to-speech capabilities for mobile and desktop browsers, said Ian Fette, product manager for the Google Chrome team, at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco late last week. Chrome is Google’s Web browser.

[ Google focused on Web media at the I/O conference. See InfoWorld’s report. ]

“We’re hoping that the text-to-speech APIs as well as the voice input, voice recognition ship in Chrome but also become a Web standard that is implementable by any browser out there,” Fette said. He could not offer an estimate on when the capabilities would be in Chrome.

Fette stressed that people want to use voice input systems. “People want to speak their input for certain types of queries,” he said.

“There’s voice recognition and there’s text-to-speech so we figured, why not build that into the browser,” Fette said, adding that the company is hopeful its technology will enable a whole new class of applications.

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Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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