Voice is the new touch in controlling the web soon…
We have already seen the expansion of AI voice control on our mobile devices and has already been built into computer systems including our Macs for many years yet it has not been as popular as AI Voice controls on mobile devices soon that will be changing with the PC as upcoming version of Windows put’s Siri’s friend Cortana on the desktop. Which will be interesting but I’m more interested on the web application side of voice control embedding it into existing websites and not waiting or depending on the devices to do it for me.
Google has already with its search engine ‘search by voice’ for some time now but I wanted to find a way to enable it on my web projects, only to find out disappointingly that Web Speech API specification is still not cross-platform supported. Only one browser vendor currently supports it, guess who? Google Chrome Browser. It’s a shame especially when more visitors are now comfortable with speaking instead of tapping away on mobile devices why not have more browsers!
If you still have not understood how great it feels to control the web application with voice than take a look at this demo of dictating a simple message that you can email. The demo (Requires Google Chrome Browser) was created two years ago but still pretty impressive.
Conclusion, I’m super excited to see the API as part of my developer tool kit for some web applications especially where information capture is really important and convenience to the visitor but due to the browser vendor support being patchy I believe it will be something in the future although you can see it already in action. The whole story reminds me of similar to the way WebRTC was something that wasn’t well supported but now it’s getting the attention that it deserves from the different browser vendors. There are many startups that are using real-time communication via APIs (WebRTC) that make it easily possible for developers to create their own applications like appear.in being a great example.
Further reading…
https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/speech-api/raw-file/tip/speechapi.html
http://shapeshed.com/html5-speech-recognition-api/
http://updates.html5rocks.com/2013/01/Voice-Driven-Web-Apps-Introduction-to-the-Web-Speech-API
