Last month Google showed off its voice-recognition chops by launching Web Speech API support for its Chrome browser. Now they’re showing developers how to use it with a fun Chrome experiment.
In the Peanut Gallery, you can add intertitles to old black-and-white movies (the ones before any speech support, never mind the web). And you do it, of course, simply by talking to Chrome.
The API uses your computer’s microphone after you give it permission, and Google turns it into written text embedded in an old movie:
Once you’ve made a movie with your own special intertitles, you can then share it to friends. The movies include The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Lost World, and Google suggests you can use them to say happy birthday to a relative, or just hello. I’m wondering when someone will use it to propose marriage.
The experiment is not just for fun, although there’s plenty of that.
“We hope that developers will find many uses for the Web Speech API, both fun and practical—including new ways to navigate, search, enter text, and interact with the web,” Google’s Aaron Koblin posted. “We can’t wait to see how people use it.”