Google Translate has been improving to the point where, in the future, it may be a complete waste of time to even attempt learning a foreign language. Kidding, sort of. And now, Google’s Chrome browser has introduced a Speech Input feature to the stable release.
This support for the HTML5 speech input API means that web developers can now subscribe the user’s voice to text. A web page could use this feature, allowing the user to speak into their microphone, and transcribe and translate the text via their speech servers, before typing out the translation.
While, at first blush, it seems like this would be most handy via mobile phone – allowing for communication between those of different languages. But, I’m sure that companies are going to quickly come up with amazingly interesting uses of this new speech input functionality.