In the coming sections we’ll explore how to use these interfaces to build up speech-enabled apps. There is nothing to stop you from implementing an app that recognizes an inputted voice command and then speaks it back to the user, but apart from that their functionality is separate.Įach one has a series of interfaces defining their functionality, at the center of which sits a controller interface - called (predictably) SpeechRecognition and SpeechSynthesis. The recognition and synthesis parts of the Web Speech API sit in the same spec, but operate independently to one another.
Browsers tend to use the speech services available on the operating system by default, so for example you’ll be using the Mac Speech service when accessing speech synthesis on Firefox or Chrome for OS X. You might be thinking “functionality like Speech Synthesis is pretty complex to implement.” Well, you’d be right. In this article we’ll explore how this API works, and what kind of fun you can already have.
As of late 2015, Firefox (44+ behind a pref, and Firefox OS 2.5+) has implemented Web Speech, with Chrome support available too! The Web Speech API has been around for quite some time, the spec having been written in around 2014, with no significant changes made since. Speech Synthesis and recognition are powerful tools to have available on computers, and they have become quite widespread in this modern age - look at tools like Cortana, Dictation and Siri on popular modern OSes, and accessibility tools like screenreaders.īut what about the Web? To be able to issue voice commands directly to a web page and have the browser read text content directly would be very useful.įortunately, some intelligent folk have been at work on this.
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