Yesterday, Google Announced on their Chrome Blog that they have launched their Web Speech API, basically enabling Voice Recognition within the browser.  This is one of the next big things in how we use computers, in my opinion of course ;)

I’m already a huge fan of both Google and their existing speech recognition capabilities.  Most recently, I upgraded my Google Search App on the iPhone and it’s brilliant.  It’s fast, lightweight and almost creepily accurate.  Being a Google Apps user and fan, I can only imagine how they will integrate it into their systems.

Google Web Speech Recognition Screenshot

Google Web Speech Recognition Screenshot. (Image courtesy of http://www.designtaxi.com)

I’m also a speech recognition fan as I have Nuances Dragon Naturally Speaking.  I’m an on and off user, primarily due to it’s size (it’s a resource hog) and it’s setup & configuration (it takes alot of “learning”).  I bought it primarily to compose emails and documents, but found myself an on/off user.  I actually considered buying stock in Nuance last year when they announced that they were going to be the brains behind some smart TV controllers.

So, great news for us!  Great news for Google.  Nuance? Hmmm . . . it’s early, but I’m almost wondering if it was a good thing that I didn’t buy that stock.