Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) released version 11 of its Chrome web browser on Wednesday. As one would expect, the new version resolves a total of 27 software bugs. It's understood that Google paid a record $16,500 in rewards to various security researchers. The highlight with this new version comes in the form of a new feature called HTML Speech Input support, which--you guessed it--converts speech into text in accordance to the HTML Speech Input API spearheaded by Google.

To show off the new feature, Google has updated its own Google Translate site with the pertinent HTML code to trigger it. When visiting the site on Chrome 11, a new microphone icon will appear beside the text box. Clicking on the icon will cause Chrome to start monitoring your microphone for voice input; the translated text automatically appears in the text box after you finish speaking. The feature fared relatively well with simplistic sentences, though it did not perform as well for complex phrases or sentences in my limited tests. Speech input in Chrome 11 is only available in English for now.

Existing chrome users should have been updated to the latest version by now; users who haven't shutdown their computers since mid-week will need to restart Chrome for the new version to take effect. New users can download Chrome here.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at InformationWeek
- check out this article at PC Mag

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