Speechify adds voice typing and voice assistant to its Chrome extension

Speak out has largely been a tool that lets you listen to articles, PDFs, and documents. The company is now adding voice detection features to its software Chrome extensionincluding voice typing and a voice assistant that answers your questions.

The past twelve months have seen a proliferation of voice detection tools, thanks to the overall improvement in the quality of speech recognition models. Speechify joins this bandwagon and launches its own dictation tool with support for English. Like other dictation tools, Speechify’s voice typing corrects errors and removes filler words.

During my short test lasting over a day, I felt there was a lot of room for improvement in Speechify’s tool. For example, the tools work fine with Gmail and Google Docs, but on sites like WordPress I’ve struggled to activate voice dictation and get it working properly. The company said it is gradually adding optimization for popular sites.

In terms of accuracy, the word error rate was higher than some other tools such as Wispr Flow, Willow and Monologue. Speechify noted that the model will learn faster the more you use it, and the error rate will gradually decrease.

The startup is also launching a voice assistant that lives in the sidebar of your browser. You can ask him questions about the website, such as “what are the three main ideas?” or ‘explain this in simpler terms’.

While ChatGPT and Gemini have conversation modes, Speechify’s argument is that their apps treat them as an afterthought, and the startup’s own tool puts voice front and center.

“We believe that chat will always be the default user experience in ChatGPT and Gemini when you open the apps. That’s what their users expect. Voice will always be secondary – and in many cases an afterthought for ChatGPT and Gemini. We know from the years of building Speechify that there is a large segment of the market, including our users, who want voice as the primary default every time they open an app and talk to AI,” said Rohan Pavuluri, the company’s Chief Business Officer. TechCrunch via email.

One notable downside here is that Speechify’s assistant currently doesn’t work with browsers with built-in sidebar assistants like OpenAI’s Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet, and Dia. The startup isn’t too worried about that, as the extension is largely aimed at Chrome and its massive user base.

Speechify said it plans to gradually include both voice typing and a voice assistant in all its apps on desktop and mobile.

The startup also wants to develop agents that perform tasks on your behalf. The startup didn’t reveal its full roadmap, but gave one example: calling to make an appointment or waiting on hold with a company’s customer support. Other companies like Truecaller and Cloacked are pursuing similar goals.