Voice Search

Voice Search is a Google Chrome extension that provides a method to search by speaking. For example, just click on microphone and say kittens to search for kittens. If you specifically want pictures of kittens, say google images kittens. Want to learn more about World War II? Say wikipedia world war two.

Voice Search comes pre-loaded with the following default services: Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Wolfram|Alpha. You can also add your own user-defined search engines. It also integrates speech input buttons for text fields on all websites.

This extension requires a microphone. Speech input is very experimental, so don't be surprised if it doesn't work. Also, try to speak clearly for best speech recognition results.

You may need to launch Chrome with the --enable-speech-input flag. To do this on Windows, right click on your Google Chrome icon (shift+right click while Chrome is closed for Windows 7 if you have it pinned to the task bar), and set the target field to the following value:

%LocalAppData%\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --enable-speech-input

In OSX, it's a little more complicated. You have to create an Apple Script with the following code and save it in ~/Applications/

do shell script "/Applications/Google\\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\\ Chrome --enable-speech-input"

Screenshots

• Voice Search popup
• Options page
• Google
• Bing
• reddit

Roadmap

Version 1.1

Implement functionality to import and export search engines and settings. Also provide an interface for setting common "task" terms and give it appropriate defaults. For example, set map to Google Maps and buy to Google Shopping and say map atlantis, buy flux capacitor, or even calculate cloud height for a 1 megaton nuclear explosion (assuming calculate is set to Wolfram|Alpha). Currently, one must create new terms to do this, and modifying the old term's URI template does not update the new term's URI template. listen to and/or play are likely to be included in this version, but I'm not sure what the default should be so I'm open to suggestions.

Version 1.2

Detect OpenSearch description files and provide a method to easily add them to Voice Search. If Google Chrome stable implements SpeechInputResultCollection, it will be used to chose the closest utterance to using a term, and if SpeechInputError events get implemented, they will be handled appropriately to inform the user of any problems recognizing speech input.

Version 2.0

Support scripted terms and revamp the options interface accordingly. There will also need to be a way for websites to signal that they provide a scripted term. This release is aimed at providing at least some of the features that Mozilla Ubiquity implemented, but for voice.