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I'm not sure if this is the right site for this question, but I was wondering how the voice activated search on Google's homepage works. Does it use Flash, some kind of plugin built into Google Chrome, or how does it use the microphone? This could be a dangerous privacy invasion if it is allowed to work the same way on any website, because no dialog asking for permission comes up, and I find this startling that Google (and who knows what other sites) can use my microphone without my permission. How is Google doing this? Javascript? Actionscript? Some custom plugin?
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Google Voice Actions gives you one API to support Android phones, tablets, and Android Wear watches.
Google Speech-to-Text is a well known speech transcription API. Google gives users 60 minutes free transcription, with $300 in free credits for Google Cloud hosting. However, since Google only supports transcribing files already in a Google Cloud Bucket, the free credits won't get you very far.
It works through the automatic speech recognition (ASR) system that transforms voice signal into text. Then search engines like Google use the text as if it's a typical search query and proceed with what they do best—matching the search query with the right results.
It's using HTML5 speech input via <input type="text" x-webkit-speech />
as the name suggests, this only works in webkit. Not sure if there are alternatives for other browsers.
See http://jsfiddle.net/xYB3n/
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It's available to anyone. There's more information here:
http://chrome.blogspot.com/2011/04/everybodys-talking-and-translating-with.html
and an example here: http://www.web2voice.com/chrome-speech-input.html
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks the lack of a permissions prompt feels a little bit big-brother-esque.
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