The HTML5 Speech Recognition API

The HTML5 Speech Recognition API allows JavaScript to have access to a browser's audio stream and convert it to text.

Chrome version 25 rolled out speech recognition so you can now invite users to talk to your web applications.

Basic usage

var recognition = new webkitSpeechRecognition();
recognition.onresult = function(event) { 
  console.log(event) 
}
recognition.start();

This will invite the user to allow a page access to their microphone. If you allow access you can start talking and when you stop the onresult event will be fired, making the results of the speech capture available as a JavaScript object.
Within this object is the result

{
  ..
  results: {
    0: {
      0: {
        confidence: 0.695017397403717,
        transcript: "look Mum I'm talking into a web page!"
      },
      isFinal:true,
      length:1
    },
    length:1
  },
  ..
}

Streaming results

You can either wait until the user has stopped talking or have results pushed to you when they are ready.

var recognition = new webkitSpeechRecognition();
recognition.continuous = true;
recognition.interimResults = true;
recognition.onresult = function(event) { 
  console.log(event) 
}
recognition.start();

This means you can start to render results before the user has started talking. This is action on the Google demo.

Accounting for accents

You can account for accents by setting the language that the speaker is using. I'm in the United Kingdom so it looks like this.

var recognition = new webkitSpeechRecognition();
recognition.lang = "en-GB";

I found results improved after I had set the language.

x-webkit-speech

Unrelated but Webkit browsers also support Speech Input fields like this

<input type="text" x-webkit-speech />

This accepts input via audio, performs speech recognition and puts the text into the input box. Interestingly there is no prompt to the user to allow access to the browser. You can see this in action here.

Security

Pages hosted on HTTP need to ask permission each time they want to make an audio capture in a similar way to requesting access to other items via the browser. Pages on HTTPS do not have to repeatedly request access. This seems a security hole to me in that an application could record audio in a room at will once a user has authorized it. The Chrome API interacts with Google's Speech Recognition API so all of the data is going via Google and whoever else might be listening.
In the context of JavaScript the entire page has access to the output of the audio capture so if you page is compromised the data from the instance could be read.

Conclusion

I can see the Speech Recognition API being very useful if results are good for plain old data entry. It would be interesting to see if this could capture something like a conversation so that you may be able to have an instant transcript. There are clearly some security concerns with this API however most notably that an HTTPS Web Application could start listening any time after you have approved access.
At the time of writing browser support seems patchy with Chrome seeming to be the only vendor to have implemented it.
After writing the article @TalAter contacted me about annyang, a library he has written to make using the API easier.

References

• Speech recognition demo
• x-webkit-speech demo
• Introduction to the Web Speech API
• Web Speech API Specification

Have an update or suggestion for this article? You can edit it here and send me a pull request.

About the author

George Ornbo is a full-stack developer based in London, UK. He is the author of Sams Teach Yourself Node.js in 24 Hours. He can be found in most of the usual places as shapeshed including Twitter and GitHub.