Google Updates Chrome Again

Following Google’s (News - Alert) update of Chrome to version 10 in March, the search giant has again bumped up its browser, this time to version 11. What does the latest edition offer?

The most dramatic change in Chrome is a new speech-to-text feature that taps into HTML5 to convert your spoken words into text on a web page. To illustrate this new feature, Google has set up its Google Translate service with a speech-to-text option.

To try out the new feature, you’ll have to update Chrome to version 11. You can do this by launching your current version of Chrome, clicking on the Gear icon in the upper right, choosing the About Google option, and then letting the update occur. Alternatively, you can grab the entire package from scratch directly from the Chrome web page.

Once version 11 is installed, browse to the Google Translate page. You’ll have to change the source language to English—for now the speech feature accepts only English. Start typing your text in the field, and you should then see a small microphone icon appear in the lower right corner of the translation text field. Change the target language to the one of your choice, such as French or Italian or Japanese. Click on the mic icon and speak your text.

When you’re finished speaking, you should see the text of your spoken words appear in the text field. At this point, you can manually correct any mistakes that may have occurred. But in my testing, the speech to text was quite accurate.

Along with the speech to text comes text to speech. You can listen to your original text in English by clicking on the Listen icon underneath it. You can also listen to the translated version by clicking on the Listen icon underneath those words. Google even gives you an option to change any word or phrase if you feel that any part of the translation isn’t accurate. And for certain languages that use a non-Latin alphabet, such as Chinese or Russian, Google gives you the ability to read the characters phonetically using Latin characters.

A recent Chrome blog describes the new speech feature. The blog only discusses this one enhancement in Chrome 11. Another Google post details several bug fixes that also are part of the new version. But overall, it seems like the speech recognition is the core feature in the upgrade and possibly something we may see in other browsers and on other Web sites as HTML5 starts to take hold.