Google today announced the release of Voice Access beta, an app that lets you use speech recognition to control Android devices.
Everyone will apparently be able to use the new feature, which is designed for specific groups of people, especially “people who have difficulty operating a touchscreen due to paralysis, tremors, temporary impairment, or other reasons,” said Eve Andersson, head of accessibility engineering at Google.
“For example, you can say 'open Chrome' or 'go home' to navigate the phone, or interact with the screen by saying 'click next' or 'scroll down,'" Andersson said in a blog post.
With the launch of Voice Access, Google is the latest company to step up its accessibility game in recent weeks. Twitter has already started the effort by letting people post images for tweets, Facebook has enhanced its iOS screen reader to describe images to people with visual impairments, Microsoft talked about its Seeing AI app at its Build developer conference, and Apple released a video showing how its iPad tablet helps an autistic person communicate with others.
We should point out how much Google has improved its speech recognition technology, which uses artificial intelligence.
Last year, Google said that Google Voice's recognition error rate had dropped by 50 percent.
With the Voice Access app, Google now has "enough testers" to further improve the app.
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