Up until now, mainly dictation software and software for disabled people made use of speech recognition, but the most recent advances have brought speech recognition to the brink of becoming an established technology in the mass market.

Speech in theory is a more natural way to articulate commands, and a proper working technology will eventually replace other input devices partially or even completely.

Firesay is an interesting add-on for Firefox, as it adds speech recognition to the web browser so that users can use voice commands to issue commands in the browser. While it is not mentioned anywhere on the page, it appears to be only compatible with Windows related PCs. It would be great if Linux, Mac, and users with Windows XP could test the add-on to see if it is compatible with their operating system as well.

The developers recommend to train the speech recognition in the Windows Control Panel. Two steps are necessary: Step one to make sure the microphone is setup correctly, and to read aloud a short text to train the speech recognition software. Once that is done all is set to test some voice commands in Firefox.

Firesay is currently offered as a beta add-on, which means it has some problems associated with it that will be sorted out over time. It supports a limited number of voice commands, including:

• go to, e.g. go to facebook, to load a website in a new tab and switch to that tab. Only a limited number of sites are currently supported, see the list here.
• open, the same as go to
• launch, the same as go to
• Search Google keyword, e.g. search google ghacks, to search in Google for the keyword.
• Close Tab, to close the active tab
• Watch, Watch the Office, to watch the TV show the Office at Hulu.

Firesay could become a helpful Firefox add-on. It’s limited command set, and problems with the voice recognition, reduce its usefulness at the moment. If the developers sort those out, and add more commands, it could become a must have extension for many Firefox users.

Firesay can be downloaded from the Mozilla Add-ons Repository.

Update: Firesay seems to have been discontinued for Firefox. It is now available for the Chrome web browser.

The demonstrator begins with dear mom and the program recognises dear aunt. He then tries to fix aunt and the program is adding more nonsense like let´s set instead of fix that. This is really funny, the audience is laughing so much at the end. Everything was recorded on live television. Microsoft is blaiming the ambient noise for the failure, decide for yourself.

You should defiantly check it out, go to blinkx.com

Blinx Search Engine

The interesting search engine, blinx.com, has an index that tracks 15,000 plus video blogs, podcasts and TV clips. It is, simply put, a search engine for video and audio media. This is a holistic approach to video searching. Upon first glance, it looks like a search engine for videos. It is actually much more than that. It can convert audio into searchable text by listening to the sound track utilizing speech-to-text technology. Enter a search term in the search box at http://www.blinkx.com/ and several different options will be presented related to the search term with surprising accuracy.

Blinx uses all video characteristics to translate the content. It does this by listening to the sound track, scanning the screen images with advanced video analytics, and then reads embedded information in the video file. It extracts the data with media-analysis plug-ins. It processes an immense amount of information to provide highly accurate search results and advanced operations implicit query and hyper linking content related to a given video. It analyzes the content that a user is either viewing or producing and cross-indexes related content in the search. The site claims to have over 35 million hours of searchable video. This is much more advanced than metadata searches.

If you have ever been frustrated with video searches on sites like YouTube, and you probably have, you know that it can take a considerably long time to find exactly what you are looking for among all of the related user posts. It is literally like searching for a toothpick in a forest when more obscure content is concerned. Not to go into detail, but the screenshot above demonstrates some videos that are extremely difficult to find. Within a second, blinx found every single one of them, much to the surprise of this author.

A Google search certainly will not produce these results and YouTube, though fantastic, has too many distractions to weed through. With blinx.com, you can build a collection of videos in a playlist by clicking an icon below the thumbnail of any video. It is added to your personal playlist and you can view the videos at any time.

The playlist can play all of the videos in a continuous stream and you can e-mail to a contact or post it on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social sites. It is incredibly easy to use, as you will discover when you try it.

When you right-click the blinx video screen, you can select settings and choose how much memory to allow blinx.com to use for playlist storage. Depending on your hard drive capacity, you can store quite a bit of videos and easily access them at any time.

There are other options to the right-click as well. Global settings allow you to customize options from the Adobe Flash Player Settings Manager interface so you can personalize storage settings, playback, etc.

To find out more, got to blinx.com and run a search. Right-click the screen and experiment with the different options and you will discover the possibilities. Overall, this is probably the best media search site currently available.