Google Releases Chrome 25 With Voice Recognition Support 93
An anonymous reader writes "Google on Thursday released Chrome version 25 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. While Chrome 24 was largely a stability release, Chrome 25 is all about features, including voice recognition support via the newly added Web Speech API and the blocking of silent extension installation. You can update to the latest release now using the browser's built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome." But if you're more interested in the growing raft of Google-branded hardware than running Google OSes, some good news (via Liliputing) about the newly released Pixel: Bill Richardson of Google posted on Thursday that the Pixel can boot Linux Mint, and explained how users can follow his example, by taking advantage of new support for a user-provided bootloader.
Clever! (Score:5, Funny)
I see what you did there, this is social engineering. Who is going to shout at their monitor "Natalie Portman grits petrified porn"?
Fappist: "Natalie Portman grits petrified porn"
Chrome: "Madly norman sits petrified corn"
Fappist: "NATALIE PORTMAN GRITS PETRIFIED PORN"
Chrome: "Actually foreman knits electrified morn"
FAPPIST: "GRRRRR! NATALIE PORTMAN GRITS PETRIFIED PORN!!!!"
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There are worse sources for inspiration. "I see you're trying to 'die you fucking piece of shit,' would you like help with that?"
Where is voice recognition being done (Score:1)
Locally? Or on their servers?
Next time you go and search, will you start getting ads for sports illustrated's swimsuit edition and Quaker?
Re:Where is voice recognition being done (Score:5, Interesting)
The proposed API itself is agnostic, it just provides a way for a page to ask for mic access and a 'plz speech-to-text-this-audio' mechanism.
Google's implementation, unshockingly enough, phones right back home to the mothership for speech recognition services. I would assume that(if this proposal makes it out of the cradle) implementations will vary: Google will phone home, Apple will 'siri' home, Microsoft might be awfully tempted to phone home on consumer SKUs, but not on enterprise ones; copies of Dragon NaturallySpeaking will probably include a browser plugin that brings your existing recognition training over to web text-to-speech, etc.
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Considering that Windows has had built-in dictation support for many years now as part of their accessibility stuff. It needs to be trained or it sucks horribly, but it's there, and the training doesn't take that long. I wouldn't be surprised if the default MS implementation even on consumer SKUs just used that.
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"Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all [wikipedia.org]"
Ah, as with Seinfeld getting Bill Gates to wag his tail for a commercial [youtube.com], some things are priceless memories of marketing brilliance. They become artifacts of the culture, they are so memorable.
And STILL No 64 Bit (Score:2)
One of these days, I'll have a supported version of Chrome which can address more than 4GB of memory in my !Linux boxen...
Re:And STILL No 64 Bit (Score:4, Interesting)
Aside from being '64 bit clean', why would you care about RAM?
Doesn't each Chrome tab run in a separate process, i.e. say each tab addresses 2GB, if you're have 8 tabs open you're maxing out your 16GB workstation??
Running a 32bit browser on a 64bit OS can be a blessing - Running Chrome on Windows means I don't have to disable (for security reasons) the 64bit Java Plugin the JDK installs.
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Doesn't each Chrome tab run in a separate process, i.e. say each tab addresses 2GB, if you're have 8 tabs open you're maxing out your 16GB workstation??
Yes, each tab runs in a seperate process. Hell I can't even max out what I have with 8GB on my home machine, or my work machine sitting beside me with 32GB. It simply dumps the tab that's not being used to the pagefile, and with the pagefile on a SSD if I switch to it, I can't notice that there's even a difference in access time.
Though 64bit binaries would be nice, though we won't see that happening until OS's start to abandon 32bit like they did 8bit and 16bit.
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Turn off swap? Chrome can't write to what doesn't exist.
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It boils down to a "64 bit clean" system. I'd prefer nothing die due to artificially limited resources -memory, in this case - being exhausted.
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It boils down to a "64 bit clean" system. I'd prefer nothing die due to artificially limited resources -memory, in this case - being exhausted.
That would require a single Chrome tab using more than 2 gigabytes of memory.
That's not going to happen and not worth worrying about.
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I thought the default builds for Firefox were still 32 bit?
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(On windows)
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No, they just aren't into doing the 10% if the wor (Score:2)
The difference between a Rolls Royce and a Volkswagen Beetle is in the 10% that costs 90% of the price/time. One of the reasons Apple did so well with its products is that it at least went for 5% at not to much extra. The "it just works" praise Apple often gets means a REALLY boring job for someone who doesn't get to build anything exciting and new but just has to fix small trivial bugs that only occur during a blue moon but are the difference between something working and NOT working.
Consider this: Java.
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Not doing extra work beyond that which is required for the goal you are attempting to achieve is efficient, not lazy (well, it isn't lazy-as-in-indolent, it is lazy-as-in-Haskell.)
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They're just not releasing it even though they claim it would take little to make it work on Windows.
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I agree with this argument on Windows. On OSX though, 32-bit chrome is a problem incidentally because of Java: on recent updates (past year) the 32-bit Java plugin on OSX was disabled. You can say what you want about Java, its vulnerabilities and shortcomings as a platform, but the fact is that many sites (banks or such) still require it, and that means I have to use Safari for those sites. It's not a big problem, but it's incovenient, and OSX, compared to Windows, has a much higher ratio of software and sy
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One of these days, I'll have a supported version of Chrome which can address more than 4GB of memory in my !Linux boxen...
Well, maybe you could use an open source browser and build it for 64 bit instead of using Chrome.
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*whoosh*
I was saying for all of my boxes that are NOT Linux. 64 bit Chrome is available for Linux as you are obviously aware.
For your edification, Mr. AC, because Wikipedia knows all:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclamation_mark#Computers [wikipedia.org]
relevant snippet:
"Several computer languages use "!" for various meanings, most importantly for logical negation; e.g. A != B means "A is not equal to B", and !A means "the logical negation of A" (also called "not A")."
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voice recognition is a bad joke (Score:3, Interesting)
It looks like they're making a marketing mistake: they make it sound as if they added recognition of arbitrary text.
There are only two things voice recognition is useful for:
* taking a small number of distinct commands
* producing nonsense poetry that keeps rhythm and rhyme with input voice
A small corpus of words can be distinguished between pretty easily -- as long as no two are similar to each other. In a real language, with many thousands of words, even a human has a hard time without understanding the subject matter and filling the gaps from context. In fact, what you hear is mostly gaps -- just try to transcribe a series of random words with any real speed. Or, for another example: in a written text, randomly permute all letters except the first and last in every word -- it will still be pretty understandable if you recognize its sense or not at all if you don't. And recognizing the sense is an AI-hard task.
Re:voice recognition is a bad joke (Score:5, Insightful)
That's funny, I used voice control of my Nexus 4 yesterday evening to open the email application, pick the correct contact and then dictate an email along the lines of:
Hi _name_,
I've just left work. I'll be home in about ten minutes.
See you then,
_my name_
That certainly seems to be more than a small number of commands. Okay, I'm not going to dictate War and Peace, but it's certainly functional.
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Does it understand non-NorthAmericans yet?
The speech recognition was completely useless on my Android phone unless I delivered a fake US accent.
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I'm not sure I understand. Are you talking about the Old World? I think Google has better things to do than get speech recognition working for fictional places and people.
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I'm Scottish and it understands me remarkably well.
You live in Scotland, or are you a typical American that's decided because his great grandfather once read a book on kilts that he's Scottish?
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You live in Scotland, or are you a typical American that's decided because his great grandfather once read a book on kilts that he's Scottish?
No true Scotsman lives in America?
Someone defining themselves as French would presumably be raised in France.
Someone defining themselves as Canadian would presumably be raised in Canada.
Someone defining themselves as Scotland would presumably be raised in Scotland.
Someone who's "1/4 French" is not French. They have a French grandparent.
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http://youtu.be/a5Wuwi9ZKxE [youtu.be]
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Not sure if you're joking or you actually managed to get some text through, but my experience with Every. Single. Recognition. Program. is same as the Frist Psot on this very article. And it's not just me: when some version of ViaVoice came out with much hype, I and a bunch of friends wasted a good part of a day trying to get a single sentence intact. With no luck -- even getting a single word through was a cause for celebration.
Things have improved since then but not by much.
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There are bad voice recognition progs out there. Google's is not one of them. Really, try it out in an phone store some time.
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You sent an email to tell _name_ you will see them in 10 minutes?
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You sent an email to tell _name_ you will see them in 10 minutes?
You never know how late he was already running before sending that email.
I've dictated similar emails when running late for work due to bad weather. If I'm already 30 minutes late, letting them know I will be there in another 10 minutes is not only polite but could be a stress reliever if someone has been waiting on you for anything important.
We've had a lot of ice storms and snow these past few weeks, an annoying one just yesterday in fact.
It started raining ice pellets around 2-3am Friday and by 7am my c
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I'd heard the original purpose of this was to help people search for things that they had no idea how to spell.
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Your post is about 5 years outdated. Google 411 when it still existed was remarkably good at acting like "siri" before siri existed. Since then google's voice recognition has become quite good-- it is about 95% accurate on my android phone, and is REALLY useful with google maps ("directions to [place of work]", "gas"), texting on the go ("Text [contact]; im on my way and will be there in 5 minutes period see you soon"), etc.
You should give it a try rather than speculating, if you really want to comment.
How do you (Score:2)
How do you pronounce "Goatse" anyhow?
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It's just a Goat, see? I vaguely considered trying this on my tablet which already has the Google voice recognition courtesy of Cyanogen Mod, but I'd rather Google not associate that with me forever.
Stability Release?! (Score:1)
Not to sound like a rant but I've almost had it with their countless bugs with password saving.. I tried every trick on the net short of abandoning it for another browser.. it won't save my passwords anymore, it never updates my existing passwords, and the ones I delete won't ask me to add them anymore.. And googling around I see countless others who have the same problems since 2009.
No I don't want to use another plugin, I'd prefer to stick to google's own as much as possible and not replicate features.. I
Hey! (Score:1)
What's with the releases every couple months? What's with the bloat? Why don't they address speed and stability bugs that have been open for two years?
Oh wait. This is a Chrome thread. Google gets a pass. Never mind.
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What's with the releases every couple months? What's with the bloat? Why don't they address speed and stability bugs that have been open for two years?
Oh wait. This is a Chrome thread. Google gets a pass. Never mind.
They're trying real hard to keep up with the bloat and stability issues of Mozilla? Google Chrome wanted to add features rapidly like Mozilla, and Mozilla envied the rapid release of Chrome. Not sure who's winning that battle. IE10 maybe, but it depends on your definition of 'winning' (no, not the Charlie Sheen drug induced euphoria definition).
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Eliminating waste -- costs that have been incurred (e.g., by investing programmer-hours in development) that are not delivering value (e.g., by being incorporated in a shipping product) are a form of waste. Basic application of Lean principles.
One user's bloat is lots of other users' value.
Probably because for those particular issues, the expected value of the
I hope they fix it. (Score:2)
Since this morning's update on Ubuntu I can't pull up Gmail. It's pretty darned annoying and now I've gone back to Firefox to wait for the next update to fix whatever is really busted.
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Are you getting lots of ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED errors? There's a Chromium ticket about that [google.com]...
Does it have decent ad blocking yet? (Score:2)
No? Wake me if it ever does.
Re:Does it have decent ad blocking yet? (Score:5, Funny)
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What is wrong with a third-party ad-blocking extension?
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https://www.google.com/search?q=adblock+chrome [google.com]
https://www.google.com/search?q=cross+domain+request+filter [google.com]
https://www.google.com/search?q=notscripts [google.com]
Youre welcome. Dont let that stop you from trotting that out every few releases, even tho these have existed for, oh, a few years now.
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Er yes, it has Adblock Plus from the same people who make the Firefox Adblock Plus. They are not quite at feature parity, but the Chrome one has been good enough for a couple of years now.
speech recognition. (Score:2)
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Yup, a while ago I wondered when Google would bring Google now and search to a PC until I realised what's the point.
It's something I use all the time on my phone because (even for an English accent) it can be quicker for certain tasks than a soft keyboard. However typing on a proper keyboard will always be faster for me.
Oy, I'm in trouble now (Score:2)
One of my favourite spontaneous epithets being, "Bite me!"
I'm sure inventive Slashdotters can devise even more entertaining variations.
This voice command doesn't work... (Score:1)
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Has anyone looked at this implementation in depth? (Score:1)
I have not had the opportunity, but is voice disabled by default and the user can selectively turn it on? I don't mean is the checkbox checked to turn it off ... is it actually off and not phoning home?
Soo innovative, only 10 years after Opera! (Score:2)
Google - the front runner of innovation :)
Btw I think this has something to do with Google Glass - those glasses will be just an aux display for the phone. Phone needs to have good voice recognition integration. To get there in time they are starting with pc browser (10 years too late).
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Why can't we have grammar support? (Score:1)
I don't know whether this has been mentioned before, but the big problem with Google's approach is that it won't allow me to define a formal grammar as the "set of things the user might reasonably say". Dictionary recognition, as is employed here and on the Android phones, has the big disadvantage that I would need some kind of natural language understanding on the (already error-prone result) for anything but dictating text.
It is in essence a projection of voice to an N-Best list of recognition results. No
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Meant to say SISR, not SSML.
It would be perfectly reasonable to send the SRGS grammar along with the voice data. It would even help Google with speech recognition as the search graph (assuming HMMs here), would be way smaller as opposed to those employing a full-blown dictionary grammar. Not accepting a grammar and only returning an N-Best list makes it pretty much unusable for anything non-trivial. What happened to all those concepts developed as part of EMMA/VoiceXML? It seems like the Web Speech API igno
Lack of consensus on grammar formats (Score:2)
AFAICT from reading the API spec and surrounding information is that's not a problem with "Google's approach", its a problem with the fact that the W3C Speech API Community Group couldn't come to a consensus on the grammar format(s) to support in the Web Speech API, so that while the API adopted in the group
Yeah Yeah Yeah (Score:1)
Let me know when the geniuses over at Google finally figure out how to release a version of Chrome that has a fucking menu bar. Until then, I'll stick to FireFox and Opera.
LK