ReadWriteWeb

The latest stable release of the Chrome browser today contains a cool new feature: speech input through HTML. This means that you can talk into your computer's microphone, and your recorded audio will be translated to text and typed out for you.

That's great for speech-to-text input in general - for the purposes of dictation and transcription. But as Google demonstrates, there are a number of other ways in which this can be utilized, including in Google Translate.

The text-input box for Google Translate now accepts voice input. Simply speak the word or phrase you'd like translated - no typing necessary. (You can also hear the translation spoken aloud too.)

As some of our readers know, I was clumsy enough to hack off a chunk of my finger while making dinner a couple nights ago. This incident has severely curtailed my blogging activity, but it's led to a fortunate inspiration, as well!

For those of you who are differently-abled - temporarily or otherwise - or for those of you who are simply too lazy to type, here are a handful of resources for hands-free Internet use, from blog posting to Twitter updates to straight-up voice-to-text transcription services. I hope you find these apps as useful as I have.

Google just announced that YouTube can now automatically generate captions and subtitles for videos in English. For now, this feature is only enabled on a handful of partner channels, but Google plans to make this feature available for all users in the future.

In the meantime, YouTube now also offers a new 'automatic caption timing' feature for all new uploads that makes it easier to add captions manually. You simply upload a text file with a transcript of the video and Google's speech recognition technology will figure out when those words are spoken and create captions based on this information.