Google Voice Search Now on PC

I just had an interesting experience in the kitchen with my daughter. We harvested about a dozen fresh tomatoes from the garden and we decided to make salsa. Wanting to try something new she asked me to do a Google search for salsa recipes. We have a family laptop that pretty much stays in the kitchen for the kids to use as needed. So I went over to the laptop and went to Google. I sat and stared at the screen appreciating the Google Logo Art   for the day then something on the right side caught my eye. A microphone! Now, I have been using Google Voice Search for many years on my iPhone but was totally surprised when I saw it on the laptop screen. I use ie & Firefox for my web browsing but it looks like the voice search got added to the Chrome browser a couple weeks ago (June 2011). This may not seem like a very big deal but it tells me that Google is moving forward with their speech to text programs full force. With this tool  and their speech to text-to-email via voice mail in Google Voice they are showing their commitment to dominating the race to kill the keyboard. That’s right “kill the keyboard.” Apple and Nuance have already made some headway into this area. Most notably Nuance with their “Dragon Dictation” which is a free app available on both iOS & Android systems. My teacher friends out there know I am a big fan of losing the keyboard in the writing process especially for students who struggle with keyboarding. We should spend less time typing and more time writing. I have teachers and students using Dragon Dictation to word process their rough drafts and some of them have set up Google Voice phone accounts so they can call themselves, leave a voice mail (they read their rough drafts into the phone) and Google emails them the speech to text translation which they copy and paste into their word processing program. With the move to the voice search in the browser it seems we are just one short step away from Google making the speech to text option a simple icon on the Google Docs Toolbar which will allow students, even some as young as 5 or 6 to use their gift of story telling to publish content. Who says we need to wait to help our young writers find their voice until they have figured out the pencil/paper thing. More on this later. Oh, BTW the salsa was great and the recipe is here SALSA.