<input type="text" x-webkit-speech />

The result should look like this (of course, in Chrome 11, in the other browsers it looks just like a normal input):

You can press the microphone icon and speak. The browser sends the recording to the Google servers, where the speech is transformed into text, which is then displayed in the input field.

While this all is great, it doesn’t work that well, at least not with the English accent of a Romanian. It does work well with simple text such as “hello world”, “chrome 11″, “a beautiful day” or “show me the money”. However, in my tests, most of the time, the recognition failed. For instance “speech input” is sometimes recognized as “speaking book”. “twenty eleven” was most of the time recognized as 27, and very rarely as 2011. For “this is the year twenty-eleven” I got “this is beer 37″, which is probably the number of beers the service had earlier . When trying “nothing else matters” I got “smoking a snickers”, “the king of snickers” and “latino snickers” until it finally figured out the correct text. So then I asked the browser “can you handle a longer sentence?” and the answers were “200 number centos”, “can you send unknown person”, “to handle a number sentence”, “200 number sentence”, “can you endorse a number sentence”, “can you handle a medical center”, “can you handle the number symptoms”, “can you pandas syndrome symptoms”, “kings honda center”, etc. etc. No matter what pronunciation I tried, it wasn’t able to pick the right text.

My conclusion is that in theory such a feature is great, but in practice Google still have a lot to work on it.

You can try it out here (with Chrome 11).

You can read more about HTML5 features in this presentation at slides.html5rocks.com.

Here are some pictures from Oslo.

National day, celebrated on May 17, draws lots of people dressed in national costumes.

Paula Seling and Ovidiu Cernauteanu, Romanian contestants for the Eurovision Song Contest 2010, rehearsing in front of the City Hall.

On board of Fram, the famous ship that made three trips to the Artic and Antarctic regions under Fridtjof Nansen, Otto Sverdrup, and Roald Amundsen.

During past months I have wrote various posts about the changes and new features for Visual C++. A summary of these articles are available here.

An important change in Visual Studio 2010 is that F#, now at version 2.0, is bundled in the IDE, just as the other languages, C++, C# and VB.NET. After 7 years in development it had become a first class language with today’s release.

More information about the release can be found here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2010/04/11/announcing-visual-studio-2010-and-net-framework-4.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/dsyme/archive/2010/04/12/f-2-0-released-as-part-of-visual-studio-2010.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2010/04/12/ship-it-visual-studio-2010-net-framework-4-now-available.aspx

For more information on these releases check the Windows Team Blog.

Update: Windows Server 2008 R2 is not yet available.

This year’s theme was “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the world’s toughest problems.” About 300.000 students from 142 countries took part in the 2009 competition.

I want to congratulate Adrian, Calin, Andreas and Cosmin for their achievement, but also all the other winners and finalists.

Update: Here is Somasegar talking about Imagine Cup 2009.

This is an English site where you can ask questions about C#, F#, J# and the .NET framework in general, publish articles and stay up to date with news about the development on the .NET framework.

Here are some links:

• Main site
• Forum
• Submit article

On the main site you’ll find a series of FAQs about using the site. Consider reading the following for registering and publishing:

• How to register
• How to submit an article

See you there!

dedicat programatorilor începatori, juniorilor din firmele de software, programatorilor de FoxPro, Visual Basic, Java, dar si programatorilor care nu au reusit sa treaca de primele versiuni de .NET (1.0, 1.1…). Sunt bineveniti si programatorii de aplicatii web, care dezvolta în PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl etc, si care vor sa se familiarizeze in ASP.NET, Silverlight si restul platformei Microsoft.

Subiectele tratate in curs vor fi:

• Programarea Orientata Obiect (OOP) cu C#
• Platforma .NET
• Limbajul C#
• Programarea web cu ASP.NET
• Programare vizuala
• ADO.NET si acces la date
• SQL Server si elemente de Business Intelligence
• Dezvoltarea de servicii web si elemente de SOA
• Programare pe SharePoint
• Programare pe Windows Mobile
• Dezvoltarea de Rich Internet Applications (RIA) cu Silverlight
• Dezvoltarea de aplicatii compatibile cu Windows 7 si Windows Vista

Cursul fiind sponsorizat de Microsoft Romania, taxa de participare este de doar 150lei (lei noi, include TVA).

Informatii detaliate despre acest eveniment gasiti pe blog-ul lui Zoli.

This year, Earth Hour has been transformed into the world’s first global election, between Earth and global warming. For the first time in history, people of all ages, nationalities, race and background have the opportunity to use their light switch as their vote – Switching off your lights is a vote for Earth, or leaving them on is a vote for global warming. WWF are urging the world to VOTE EARTH and reach the target of 1 billion votes, which will be presented to world leaders at the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009. This meeting will determine official government policies to take action against global warming, which will replace the Kyoto Protocol. It is the chance for the people of the world to make their voice heard.

You can find all the details about this campaign at www.voteearth2009.org and www.earthhour.org.

   Earth Hour 2009 by WWF – Sign up for Earth Hour!

Be one of the one billion people to turn off lights on March 28!

We are seven MVPs from Romania. Here is a picture from yesterday dinner.