Google While the Web Speech API is clearly the focus of today’s launch, Google added many other security and developer-focused features to the beta as well.

Web Speech API The latest stable version of the Google Chrome browser includes speech recognition capabilities. Google announced it via the Chrome blog late last week “Web apps, listen up.

Google has rolled out a new addition to its Chrome browser this week in the form of a new Web Speech API, allowing users to use speech when visiting supported websites using the Google Chrome browser.

The Web Speech API will now likely be used by other Web developers to build more pages and content that will allow users to ditch their keyboards for a wide range of functions.

It cleverly relies on the Web Speech API to deliver the speaking parts, which helps keep the code size tiny. The only thing it’s missing is an occasional shadow of static drifting across the audio.

The API itself is agnostic of the underlying speech recognition and synthesis implementation and can support both server-based and client-based/embedded recognition and synthesis.

Google's Text-to-Speech API competes with Amazon Web Services' Polly, which lists 54 available voices.