Forum Discussion

NicolSD's avatar
NicolSD
Steel Contributor
May 14, 2019
Solved

Edge can't use the mic in the Google Translate page

Edge Canary and Dev don't seem to know how to use a microphone. I tried the following steps both on a workstation connected to a Logitech's Brio webcam's microphone, and a Surface Pro 4 using the bui...
  • florianSB's avatar
    florianSB
    Jan 13, 2020
    My guess is that all these Tools use the WebSpeechApi which only works on Google Chrome/Chromium (at least the recognition part) because Google uses it's own cloud servers for the audio transcription. Since the new Edge is basically Chromium it probably thinks that the WebSpeechApi is supported and breaks. The API behaves very strange currently in Edge.
florianSB's avatar
florianSB
Brass Contributor
Jan 13, 2020
My guess is that all these Tools use the WebSpeechApi which only works on Google Chrome/Chromium (at least the recognition part) because Google uses it's own cloud servers for the audio transcription. Since the new Edge is basically Chromium it probably thinks that the WebSpeechApi is supported and breaks. The API behaves very strange currently in Edge.
netplaceus's avatar
netplaceus
Copper Contributor
Sep 11, 2020

florianSB Your right, but I believe the reason is This:  

In my opinion there is nothing wrong, it is not a bug that the ONLY browser that can access Google translate and Google voice search is the google browser Chrome. Don't be naive, what would you expect Microsoft to say? Yeah, right, it's a bug. The microphone will work just fine with non-Google services. Seriously, Microsoft (and the others) have a HUGH incentive to fix this problem (if they could) or lose browser popularity and Google has every incentive to BLOCK that functionality to keep you around using Chrome services they pay for and developed. Microsoft Edge microphone works fine with BING! 
  • florianSB's avatar
    florianSB
    Brass Contributor
    Sep 21, 2020

    netplaceus 

    Google primarily wants people to use their search engine and services, if thats done with Chrome ... even better for them, but they usually don't explicitly "block" a feature if that makes one of their services harder to use.

    Chrome is still the only browser that fully supports speech recognition via the web speech API and its up to the website developer to use feature detection to properly implement it. Unfortunately if they don't it will look like a browser bug. At least Microsoft Edge finally sends a correct error message and they said that they want to fix this issue this month allegedly by implementing ASR properly so I guess we'll see the result soon ^^.