Web Speech API Links and Resources

Documentation

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Speech_API  – Some of the only decent documentation you’ll find.
• https://caniuse.com/#feat=speech-synthesis – Browser support for speech synthesis
• https://caniuse.com/#feat=speech-recognition – Browser support for speech recognition

Tutorials

• https://shapeshed.com/html5-speech-recognition-api/

Helper Libraries

• Artyom – https://sdkcarlos.github.io/sites/artyom.html – a simple API for building voice commands with voice responses. A great tool to play with and learn from, but the project no longer seems to be active.

Commercial APIs

• Google Cloud Speech-to-Text – https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/ – this is the same backend that powers Chrome’s speech recognition
• Bing Speech API – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/speech/ – from Microsoft
• Open source attempts:
  • Common Voice – https://voice.mozilla.org/ – Mozilla’s project for building an open-source data set for speech recognition machine learning. Make sure to add your voice!
  • Deep Speech – https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech – An open source speech to text machine learning engine based on Tensor Flow.
  • Django Deepspeech Server – https://github.com/ashwan1/django-deepspeech-server – An attempt to mimic the Google Voice APIs using Deep Speech.

Cross Browser Status

• Firefox Issue – https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1248897#c23
• Chromium and Electron’s lack of support – https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/api-keys
• Microsoft Edge Uservoice Issue – https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/257854-microsoft-edge-developer/suggestions/6263660-web-speech-api-input

Examples

• DuoLingo – https://www.duolingo.com/ – Learn how to speak another language, including voice recognition in other languages.
• Read Aloud – https://github.com/ken107/read-aloud – An open source browser add-on (Chrome, Firefox) that can read any page in one click.
• Spoken Word WordPress Plugin – https://github.com/westonruter/spoken-word – A wordpress plugin that uses the Speech Synthesis API to add an interface for reading your blog posts out loud.

Voice and User Interface Design

• Conversational Design – https://abookapart.com/products/conversational-design – A book by Erika Hall exploring how to design user experiences around conversations.