What is the "SpeechAgent" extension and how does it work?

This extension adds a new action button to your browser's toolbar area, which opens a text recognition tool when it is needed. To efficiently use the extension, focus the text area that needs to be filled with your voice, and then open the browser action's interface. There is a microphone voice analyzer on the left side of the window, and there is a play/pause button on the right-side. To improve usability, the extension starts recognizing the speech as soon as the interface is opened. The recognized transcript is displayed under the analyzer and also is inserted into the active editable area of the page. You can press the stop button to pause the recognization engine or simply close the popup window altogether. Note that this extension only monitors the microphone when the popup window is open. There is no activity when the interface is not open.

What's new in this version?

Please check the Logs section.

Why does this extension need permission to access my microphone?

This extension needs this permission to record your speech when the toolbar interface is open. The recorded speech is split into small pieces, and these segments are sent to a text recognition engine to extract the transcript. This extension only asks the native engine of your browser to do the speech to text recognition. There is no server-side code for this extension. The same process happens when you use the speech to text recognition on the Google search page.

I need the speech to text recognition feature, but there is no active text area. Can I still use the popup interface without first selecting a text area?

Yes, the extension also prints the transcript into the built-in text area of the popup interface. Also, there is a copy button next to this area. Click on the button for the text to get copied to the clipboard.

Keyboard Shortcuts (v0.2.01)

This extension keeps the list of the frequently used languages on top of the list.