Web browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Opera have been using WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication), a free, open source project to create audio conference calls and video chat for years.
WebRTC uses a series of standard protocols and corresponding JavaScript APIs (application programming interfaces) to allow Web developers to create real-time audio/video communication via the Internet, between browsers, without needing plug-ins or additional tools.
By using JavaScript API syntactic tag features <video> and/or <audio>, for example, playing and recording video and audio is as easy as having a plug-in for free VoIP and webcam chats.
To include audio and video from local devices, like the microphone for voice recordings and the webcam for face recognition, be sure to follow the instructions and Web Audio API specification developed by the Real-Time Communications in WEB-browser (RTCWEB) working group within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to have WebRTC 1.0 be installed on a Linux, Mac or Windows platform.
Web RTC users can also count on Jos Dirksens’ knowledge; he recently wrote an article about how to use WebRTC in Chrome for audio and video communication and to setup speech recognition with JavaScript by using websockets: Its protocol facilitates communication between the client’s Web browser and the server.
Even though many Web browsers support websockets, to include Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari, only Google Chrome provides HTML 5 rules and speech input API specification for accessing the microphone to talk.
The benefit of HTML 5 is that it offers Web developers an easy to use JavaScript to control the <audio> and <video> elements to introduce new audio features to the Web.
To acquire the microphone, one can simply ask using “getUserMedia”; this will allow access to the microphone. It will also require the person needing to enable the "Web Audio Input" flag to allow live audio input.
To recap, speech recognition and audio capture is possible by using WebRTC in Google Chrome, or another Web browser. One’s voice can be recorded using websockets. Using Chrome for speech recognition is possible when the Web audio input flag is enabled. Then a microphone can record one’s voice encode it as a WAV file for Google to transcribe as speech-to-text.
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Edited by
Brooke Neuman
