Google Launches Chrome 11 Beta with Speech to Text Feature

Lately we had been witnessing some major action in the internet browser arena. First we got to experience Internet Explorer, which turned out to be surprisingly fast and feature-packed. Microsoft also did not waste any time in petting its back by claiming 2.35 million downloads within the first 24 hours of its launch. However, Mozilla did not take long to launch Firefox 4, which easily usurped IE9 and garnered 4.7 million downloads in 24 hours. And now Google has come up with the beta of its 11^th version of Chrome.

Although, the first thing that you would notice about the beta is the new minimalistic look of its logo, but the changes in the new browser are not only cosmetic. The new browser now provides support for the speech input API. Using this technology, now the developers can design their apps to accept speech input. So, if you stumble on to a webpage incorporating this new technology, you can simply interact with site using speech, instead of typing everything out. Google blog also gives you a demo, which we tried and found a little too buggy. Since it is a beta version, we hope that the kinks would be ironed out in the final release. Another main feature of the updated browser is its ability to support 3D effects. Newly released Firefox 4 also features 3D acceleration support.

Chrome 11 beta has been released for all major platforms including PC, Mac and Linux. If you are willing to give it a whirl, then you can download the beta version here. Stable version of Chrome 11 is expected to be released soon. Let's see if Chrome 11 surpasses Firefox 4 tally.