Voice Search for Google Chrome

Voice Search is a Google Chrome addition that lets you search using your voice. It's not urbanized by Google, but it uses an untried Chrome feature called form speech input. The feature is enabled by default in the dev channel builds, but it can be physically enabled by adding a command-line flag.

"Voice Search comes pre-loaded with the subsequent default services: Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Wolfram|Alpha. You can also add your own user-defined search engines. It also integrates a speech input button for all websites using HTML5 search boxes. This addition requires a microphone. Speech input is very experimental, so don't be astonished if it doesn't work. Also, try to speak clearly for best speech credit results," suggests the author.

Speech gratitude is limited to English and it doesn't work very well, but this addition is a good way to test a feature that will be enabled in the prospect Chrome releases. If you have a website, it's quite easy to add support for speech input, but it may take a while until Google's Speech Input API requirement becomes a standard and all browsers apply it.

Translating Wikipedia

We believe that the translation is the key to our mission of making information useful to everyone. For example, Wikipedia is a phenomenal source of the knowledge, especially for speakers of common languages such as English, German and French where there are hundreds of thousands—or millions—of articles available. For many smaller languages, however, Wikipedia doesn’t yet have anywhere near the same amount of the content available.

To help Wikipedia become more helpful to the speakers of smaller languages, we’re working with volunteers, translators and Wikipedians across India, the Middle East and Africa to translate more than 16 million words for the Wikipedia into Arabic, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Swahili, Tamil and Telugu. We began these efforts in 2008, starting with translating Wikipedia articles into Hindi, a language spoken by tens of millions of Internet users. At that time the Hindi Wikipedia had only 3.4 million words across 21,000 articles—while in the contrast, the English Wikipedia had 1.3 billion words across 2.5 million articles.

We selected the Wikipedia articles using a couple of the different sets of criteria. First, we used Google search data to determine the most popular English Wikipedia articles read in India. Using Google Trends, we found the articles that were consistently read over the time—and not just temporarily popular. Finally we used the Translator Toolkit to translate articles that either did not exist or were placeholder articles or “stubs” in Hindi Wikipedia. In three months, we used a combination of human and machine translation tools to translate 600,000 words from more than 100 articles in the English Wikipedia, growing Hindi Wikipedia by almost 20 percent. We’ve since repeated this process for other languages, to bring our total number of words translated to 16 million.

We’re off to a good start but, as you can see in the graph below, we have a lot more work to do to bring the information in Wikipedia to people worldwide:

We’ve also found that there are many Internet users who have used our tools to translate more than 100 million words of Wikipedia content into various languages worldwide. If you do speak another language we hope you’ll join us in bringing Wikipedia content to other languages and cultures with Translator Toolkit.

We presented these results last Saturday, July 10, at Wikimania 2010 in Gdańsk, Poland. We look forward to continuing to support the creation of the world’s largest encyclopedia and we can’t wait to work with Wikipedians and volunteers to create more content worldwide.