There is definitely reason to get excited about the latest build of Chrome Browser which is Version 11 Beta. It features 2 new huge inclusions besides the trivial addition of the shiny new Chrome logo – Speech-to-text and 3D CSS!
I’m really excited about the use of Voice-to-text because I use it absolutely ALL the time on my Android Phone. With a limited size keyboard I can see why it’s more useful on a phone than a laptop or netbook that has a full keyboard, but I’ve got some hunches as to why they’re baking this feature into Chrome browser itself.
Android 2.3 Gingerbread is for phones, Android 3.0 Honeycomb is for tablets, and the next version of Android dubbed “Ice Cream” will not only combine code optimized for these two platforms… but also for Google TV. Remember that Google TV is based both on Android and Chrome – I think it’s fair to say there are scenarios when you’re watching Google TV from your couch where you’d like to use Speech-To-Text and watch 3D rendering in web apps.
At Google IO on May 10th and 11th, I’d expect Google to announce some huge additions to both Chrome and Google TV. The inclusion of Speech-to-text for web apps, in my opinion, is a sign of things to come.
