14 DAY TRIAL // During a special event, Google made a flurry of announcements relating to its search engine, on the desktop as well as mobile devices. Google introduced quite a few new features and, in an interesting trend, it has now ported some of the features mobile users have enjoyed for years to the desktop version.
One such feature is voice search which has now made its way into the main search engine. Voice search, as the name implies, enables users to simply speak their queries and let Google do the rest.
"We first offered speech recognition on mobile search, but you should have that power no matter where you are. You should never have to stop and ask yourself, 'Can I speak for this?'—it should be ubiquitous and intuitive," Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, wrote.
"So we've added speech recognition into search on desktop for Chrome users. If you’re using Chrome, you’ll start to see a little microphone in every Google search box. Simply click the microphone, and you can speak your search," he announced.
The new feature comes courtesy of Chrome's support for the HTML5 speech input API, available from Google Chrome 11. In fact, voice input on the search page has been spotted in testing in the wild last month.
So far, Google Chrome is the only browser to support the feature, but if you're using Google's browser, you should be able to see the mic icon in the search box.
Speech input is not as crucial on the desktop as it is on mobile devices, which is why the feature debuted there, but it can be very useful, especially with the rise in popularity of tablet devices with no physical keyboards.
It also comes in handy for longer queries or hard-to-spell ones which can be done faster by just speaking in the microphone rather than typing.