Mozilla starts test with voice control Firefox

Mozilla has started beta testing for Firefox Voice. This experimental extension allows users to control the desktop version of the browser with voice commands. The feature uses Google’s Cloud Speech.

Firefox Voice is an experiment by Mozilla Emerging Technologies. The add-on currently only works with the desktop version of Firefox, with Mozilla recommending using the Nightly or Developer Edition in beta testing. The aim is to see if and how voice control can be used as a good way to interact with the browser.

Mozilla has listed a large number of applications for Voice. For example, the function offers the possibility to ask questions, play music via YouTube or Spotify, read or translate pages, search, close or open tabs and search for information within a large number of services.

Users must click on a microphone icon to activate the service. There doesn’t seem to be a hotword to open it with speech. Mozilla uses Google’s Cloud Speech-to-Text for the WebSpeech API in Firefox. Mozilla first sends data through its own proxy before the data goes to Google, in part to remove user information, the organization said.