The SpeechRecognition API

There’s an older deaf gentleman in my town who’s very friendly, and likes to communicate with rudimentary hand gestures, but I have a hard time understand what he’s trying to say. I’d love to learn American Sign Language (ASL) at some point (shoutout King Ron), but until then, I wanted an app that could convert speech into text. Every transcription app I found required a pretty expensive subscription… so I decided to build my own using web technologies! Demo Before we dive into how this all works, here’s the finished app. Press the microphone button to listen to text and display it in the UI in real-time. You can also type/edit text manually with a keyboard. The app works in Chrome, Edge, and Safari, but not in Vivaldi or Firefox (more on that later). new SpeechRecognition() The SpeechRecognition web API can take spoken audio and convert it into text. Some browsers use a prefixed implementation, so to start, need to define SpeechRecognition and SpeechRecognitionEvent variables that…