You can now say several sentences and see them written to the page. Open the HTML you downloaded earlier and between the tags at the bottom we'll start by listening for the DOMContentLoaded event and then grabbing references to some elements we'll use. Let's take the starter code we downloaded earlier and the code from dev tools and turn this into a small application where we live transcribe a user's speech. Hopefully we will see local, offline speech recognition abilities down the line, but for now this is a limitation. So, since SpeechRecognition uses a server side API, your users will have to be online to use it. Mozilla are working on their own DeepSpeech engine, but want to get support into browsers sooner so opted to use Google's service too. Mozilla has built support for speech recognition into Firefox, it is behind a flag in Firefox Nightly while they negotiate to also use the Google Cloud Speech API. This is why speech recognition is currently only supported in Chrome and some Chromium based browsers. Chrome currently takes the audio and sends it to Google's servers to perform the transcription. The default is to only return one alternative, but you can opt to receive more alternatives from the recognition service, which can be useful if you are letting your users select the option closest to what they said.Ĭalling this feature speech recognition in the browser is not exactly accurate. Inspecting that result shows a list of SpeechRecognitionAlternative objects and the first one includes the transcript of what you said and a confidence value between 0 and 1. Well, there is one result object as we only said one thing before it stopped listening. The most important property is results which is a list of SpeechRecognitionResult objects. Let's dig into the SpeechRecognitionEvent object. There are settings we'll see later that allow continuous transcription and interim results as you speak. Also, you only receive the final result from the speech recognition service. To continue transcription you need to call start again. Once the object receives a result it will stop listening. There are some default settings at work here too. We created an instance of the SpeechRecognition API (vendor prefixed in this case with "webkit"), we told it to log any result it received from the speech to text service and we told it to start listening. There is a lot going on in these 3 lines of code. Once you stop speaking you should see a SpeechRecognitionEvent posted in the console. Run the code and, once you've given the permission, say something into your microphone. When you run that code Chrome will ask for permission to use your microphone and then, if your page is being served on a web server, remember your choice. The SpeechRecognition APIīefore we build speech recognition into our example application, let's get a feel for it in the browser dev tools. With that in place, let's see how to get the browser to listen to and understand us. Make sure the files are in the same directory and then open the HTML file in the browser. Once you have those prepared, create a new directory to work in and save this starter HTML and CSS to that directory. We're going to build an example app to experience the API, if you want to build along you will need:Īnd that's it, we can do this with plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Let's see how the API works and what we can build with it. With speech recognition in the browser you can enable users to speak to your site across everything from a voice search to creating an interactive bot as part of the application. In 2018, Google reported that 27% of the global online population is using voice search on mobile. We previously investigated text to speech so let's take a look at how browsers handle recognising and transcribing speech with the SpeechRecognition API.īeing able to take voice commands from users means you can create more immersive interfaces and users like using their voice. The Web Speech API has two functions, speech synthesis, otherwise known as text to speech, and speech recognition, or speech to text.
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