Marius Bancila’s Blog

This Wednesday Google released version 11 of the Chrome Browser. One of the most important addition was the support for speech recognition for English. One can enable speech recognition in an input field by adding the x-webkit-speech proprietary attribute, like in this example:

  <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.

I recently read an excerpt from Joel Spolsky’s book User Interface Design For Programmers available on his (former) blog. This is a great book about designing user interfaces, with examples of bad and good ideas. I’m getting the printed version and I recommend this to all building UIs.

Now, yesterday I had a problem with Google Documents (which no longer worked on my WinXP machine with any browser, as it continuously unsuccessfully tried to download a 237 bytes file called download.gz) and I though that deleting the cache might help. So I opened Google Chrome options dialog and then the Clear Browsing Data dialog. It looks like this.

I was stunned to see the dialog started with the phrase “Obliterate the following items”. For God’s sake what is obliterating? I want to delete the cache, I don’t care about obliterating, and whatever that means. I don’t want to fetch a dictionary and look-up for the meaning of the word. Excuse me Mr. Google Programmer, that I (probably like many of the people of this world who are not native English speakers) don’t know what “obliterate” means. Yes, it does sound archaic, it does sound like J.R.R. Tolkien but it stops me doing my work. All I wanted to do was selecting what to delete and delete. Instead I spent time figuring whether that means to select what to keep or select what to delete (luckily it didn’t say purge). I had doubts so I had to search for the meaning of the word. Sure, now I know one more (fancy) English word, but overall, I lost one minute doing anything else but deleting the cache.

So, my recommendation to you Mr. Google Programmer is to read Joel Spolsky’s book. I’m sure there are things you can learn from it. And start using simple words and sentences that everyone understands.

As for what “obliterate” means, here it is:

• Mark for deletion, rub off, or erase
• Make undecipherable or imperceptible by obscuring or concealing
• Remove completely from recognition or memory
• Do away with completely, without leaving a trace

I’m sometimes asked what browsers do I use and why. I use Firefox and Chrome, 95% of the time, and IE for those few Microsoft sites that are specially designed to work only with IE. Here is a story that shows an argument why I use those two.

A few days ago I used my father’s laptop to do some web browsing. My father is not a computer specialist, but he knows how do use a computer for basic stuff like writing documents, browsing the web or downloading pictures from his digital camera. His laptop runs Windows XP and he had IE 6. Seeing that I though that’s so 2006. So I decided to upgrade that to IE 8. While IE8 was downloading I also decided to download and install Chrome for my own use. It took about a minute to download and install it. I was already surfing the web with Chrome by the time IE8 had done downloading.

Next step was to start the installer, but surprise, IE8 was requiring .NET 3.5 SP1. This was only 56MB or something so it didn’t take lot of time to download (but this could be very different in other geographical locations), however I thought that was a prerequisite whose purpose I don’t necessary see. So I started to install it and surprise: I got an error message that .NET 2.0, which was already installed, could not be uninstalled because it was not found. After some failed re-attempts I decided to uninstall .NET 2.0 manually and it worked well. However, running the .NET 3.5 SP1 setup again ended with the same error. So I decided to try .NET 3.5 without SP1. After a longer download the setup ran into the same error. Next, I downloaded .NET 3.0 and tried to install, but with the same error. At that point it was quite clear to me that there was something wrong with the uninstallation of .NET 2.0. After reading reports of similar problems on the web and without any suggestion being actually helpful I decided to download version 2.0 of the framework. Its setup allowed me to Uninstall or Repair and I chose to Uninstall. It said everything was OK so I tried 3.5 SP1 setup again, and this time it worked! Finally I was able to start the IE8 installation and it required to download and install a few updates and a couple of Windows restarts, and eventually it was up and running, one hour later after starting!

So my question to Microsoft is: how do you expect someone without good knowledge about computers and software installation be able to go through such a scenario? Chrome installation worked gracefully with 3-4 clicks and in less than a minute I was able to use it already. IE8 requires lots of updates and prerequisites like .NET and restarts and God forbids something goes wrong, you’re lost in installation. If the installation doesn’t work, you don’t have a product!

This is one reason (and definitely not the most important one) I prefer Firefox and Chrome over IE.