Google has delivered the latest stable release of Chrome – version 25 for those still counting – which includes a number of bug fixes, improved security agains rogue extensions, and voice recognition support via the Web Speech API. The latter will allow developers to accept voice input in their web applications for things like dictation, search, navigating through options or whatever else they can think of.
Chrome's implementation of the Web Speech API accepts short bursts or continuous speech, the data is then sent to the Google Voice service for analysis and the results are sent back to the browser. Chrome speech recognition supports numerous languages, including localized variants of English and Spanish, as well as French, Italian, German, Portuguese, and even some right-to-left languages.
Google has put together a demo of the API in action for anyone to try out the new feature.
The latest update to the browser also disables silent extension installs in Chrome for Windows. Back in December Google explained that silent extension installs were originally intended to allow users to opt-in to adding a useful extension to Chrome as a part of the installation of another application. Unfortunately, this feature was widely abused by third parties to install extensions without proper acknowledgment from users.
As far security fixes are concerned, Google has patched a memory corruption issue when processing web audio, a buffer overflow in decoding of Vorbis files, a memory access fault with the SVG parser, a use-after-free error in the browser's database and URL handling, among others. All in all, the update addresses 22 vulnerabilities between high (9), medium (8), and low (5) rated security problems.
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