Archive for February, 2014

Ext JS: Speech Recognition Wrapper

Feb 16th

Posted by existdissolve in Chrome

1 comment

On Friday, I saw a write-up on using the Web Speech API for capturing and transcribing speech. I was inspired to see how this could be incorporated into Ext JS, so I started exploring.

First, I discovered that you can already add the x-webkit-speech attribute on a text field, and it will automatically create an audio-capture-ready text field in Chrome. All you have to do is hook up listeners to handle particular events. While this was promising, I found a big problem: if you try this in Canary, you’ll be greeted with a nasty deprecation warning. Apparently, Chrome will eventually be ditching the input-support in favor of full-on use of the JavaScript API.

No matter, that’s more flexible anyway. Based on this conclusion, I dove into the API and created an Ext JS wrapper that supports interactions with the Web Speech API. You can try out an example, and grab the source on GitHub.

About the API

The API has a fair amount to it, so I’ll highlight some of the configuration options, as well as describe a bit about the results, which can be a bit confusing.

Configuration
  • continuous: If false, you get a one-shot stab at capturing audio. Once the audio is no longer detected, the capture More >
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Sencha Fiddle 1.1 Released

Feb 6th

Posted by existdissolve in ExtJS

1 comment

Awesome news today–a new version of Sencha Fiddle was just released! This version (1.1) has a bunch of new goodies included in it, some of which really add benefit to the tool.

I’m not going to rehash all the features (you can read those here), but I’ll highlight the…er…highlights 🙂

Improved Search

The search in the prior version of Sencha Fiddle was pretty basic. It worked, but could only get you so far. The updates to search in 1.1 make it incredibly easier to search by multiple criteria, as well as controlling the sort order of the results. You can still search by simple keywords, but the advanced search really allows for some more fine-tuning of results.

In the future, I’d like to see some enhancements in the way of being able to clear search criteria, as well as even being able to save search criteria sets…but for the time being, the new search is a very big improvement!

Downloadable Fiddles

I think this enhancement is especially nice. Fiddle 1.1 now includes the ability to download your fiddle as a standalone “app” of sorts. Basically you get a zip archive that includes an HTML file, an app.js, as well as any other files that More >