x-webkit-speech input and textareas

New hotness, speech input. (The demo, the demo)

You get an input:

<input>

You add an x-webkit-speech attribute

<input x-webkit-speech>

And voila!

Or if you don't have a recent Chrome version, here's what these who have a recent Chrome version see:

Nice.

Textareas

Speech inputs - gotta love them. But in textareas - you can't have them. So you can put an input and a textarea and copy over the content.

html:

<textarea id="txt"></textarea>
<input x-webkit-speech id="mike"/>

With some CSS you can remove the border, add pointy cursor, etc make it look like not an input.

#mike {
    font-size: 25px;
    width: 25px;
    height: 25px;
    cursor:pointer;
    border: none;
    position: absolute;
    margin-left: 5px;
    outline: none;
    background: transparent;
}
#txt {
    height: 150px;
    width: 150px;
}

Finally a little JavaScript to a/ unfocus the input and b/ carry over the content from the input to the textarea

var mike = document.getElementById('mike');
mike.onfocus = mike.blur;
mike.onwebkitspeechchange = function(e) {
    //console.log(e); // SpeechInputEvent
    document.getElementById('txt').value = mike.value;  
};

That's all there is. Click over to the demo.

Here's what you should see in Chrome:

You can see that console.log() there - it's definitelly worth exploring. The thing is a SpeechInputEvent type of object is passed to the handler of the onwebkitspeechchange event. This object has some interesting properties, such as the array results[] which is number of guesses what you've said and confidence (0 to 1 it seems) in the guess.

Enjoy and go ahead and add these all over the place! 🙂

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