Google rolled out an updated beta version of its Chrome browser for Windows, Mac and Linux with “Ok Google” search functionality on top of a few new features and new apps/extension APIs for developers.
To enable “Ok Google” voice search, users will have to click on the microphone icon in Google’s Chrome search bar and select “Enable ‘OK, Google’ from the menu.
“With the latest Chrome Beta, you can search by voice on Google—no typing or clicking required. Simply open a new tab or visit Google.com in Chrome, say “Ok Google,” and then start speaking your search,” wrote Google in a blog post.
“This will be rolled out to English (U.S.) users on Windows, Mac and Linux over the next few days, with support for additional languages and Chrome OS coming soon.”
Earlier, Chrome users used Google’s Voice Search Hotword extension available in the Chrome browser Web Store to enable “Ok Google” search functionality. With this update, the users can simply say “Ok Google” and speak their search term, set a timer and also create reminders for Google Now.
The update also brings with it the ability to import supervised users, lots of under the hood changes for stability and performance, and a number of new apps/extension APIs.
Google claims the new HTML attribute for Responsive Images will allow developers to provide multiple resources in varying resolutions for any particular image and the chrome browser will pick the resource that fits the device’s resolution, while the un-prefixed Web Audio API is for processing and synthesising audio in web applications.
As part of this update, Google has removed a few “infrequently used web platform features.”
