on-device speech recognition with the Web Speech API

[Connie Leung]

In Chrome 139, on-device speech recognition is supported.

Where can I find more information or examples?

Text-to-Speech is always supported, I wonder if it is part of the Chrome built-in AI.

Release notes:

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/new-in-chrome-139#on-device-web-speech-api

Thanks,

Connie

[François Beaufort]

The explainer is in pretty good shape at https://github.com/WebAudio/web-speech-api/blob/main/explainers/on-device-speech-recognition.md
Note that we're planning to share more once Contextual Biasing ships as well: https://github.com/WebAudio/web-speech-api/blob/main/explainers/contextual-biasing.md 

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[Connie Leung]

François,

Thank you for getting back to me so quickly.

I wonder if on-device speech recognition will be mentioned  in Google I/O Connect Shanghai.  It totally came out of the blue.

Connie

Connie

[Scott Fortmann-Roe]

To add to this, we've been playing with the on-device transcription. It's working really well on our MacBooks, but when we test it on a Chromebook we get a "language-not-supported" error (when passing "en-US").

Is there guidance on the minimum device requirements to use it?

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[François Beaufort]

IIRC you can search for SODA (Speech On-Device API) in chrome://components/ and you'll see which language packs are available in your machine.

To add new ones, go to chrome://settings/?search=language and click "Add languages" when Live Caption is enabled.


Let me know if it works for you as I don't have a ChromeOS machine at hand right now.

[Gaurang Tandon]

Hi François, thanks for your suggestion. I just tried it out; sadly, the language packs didn't get listed in chrome://components/

Additionally, I noticed that when I run await SpeechRecognition.install({ langs: ['en-US'], processLocally: true, }); on a Macbook, the "SODA en-US Models" become listed on chrome://components. However, when I run the same code on a Chromebook, the models don't become listed on chrome://components. The return value in both cases is true.

[François Beaufort]

I just got a Chromebook and can reproduce this issue with the following code.

await SpeechRecognition.available({ langs: ["en-US"], processLocally: true });
// 'available'
await SpeechRecognition.install({ langs: ["en-US"], processLocally: true });
// true

const speechRecognition = new SpeechRecognition();
speechRecognition.lang = "en-US";
speechRecognition.processLocally = true;
speechRecognition.onerror = error => console.log(error);
speechRecognition.start();
// SpeechRecognitionErrorEvent {error: 'language-not-supported', ....

I'll reach out to the Chrome engineering team and will let you know what's happening.

My naive guess is that ChromeOS is not plugged into the Web Speech API yet but we'll see ;)

[Gaurang Tandon]

Thanks for checking this so quickly, François! I had also filed a bug report for this - https://issues.chromium.org/issues/436137785 - sharing it in case it's helpful.

[François Beaufort]

As you can see in https://issues.chromium.org/issues/436137785#comment4, the Chrome team just disabled on-device Web Speech specifically on ChromeOS as the implementation was incomplete with https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/6859764 

Thanks for reporting this issue!
Hopefully, the implementation will be completed soon so that all users can enjoy on-device Web Speech on ChromeOS.

[Scott Fortmann-Roe]

Thanks for the update, Francois. Looking forward to this being supported on ChromeOS.