As news of Firefox 4’s five million downloads in the first 24 hours of public release emerges, Google have pushed out Chrome 11 beta. The most notable new feature in Chrome 11 is the browser’s ability to transcribe voice to text.
The feature, which is demoed here, will potentially allow quicker browser searching and address look-up by allowing users to input their desired phrase or address using speech.
Along with speech to text capabilities the next iteration of Chrome comes with a brand-new cleaner icon. Chrome 11 also introduces GPU-accelerated 3D CSS, allowing web developers to integrate 3D effects purely using CSS3 – great for HTML5 app building.
Chrome 11 beta is currently only available to Windows XP, Vista, and 7 users.
I see browsers getting more and more competitive with the new releases of IE9(which is surprisingly not that bad), Firefox 4.0 and now Chrome. And Chrome is already at it with this new beta version. Personally, I didn’t experience a very accurate speech-to-text and wrote about it here:
http://www.softwarecrew.com/2011/03/chrome-11-beta-adds-html5-based-speech-input-support/
I found this feature pretty cool even though it doesn’t always work when I try using it.
I found this feature pretty cool even though it doesn’t always work when I try using it.