Speechify adds voice typing and a voice assistant to its Chrome extension

Quack is largely a tool to help you listen to articles, PDFs and documents. The company is now adding voice detection features to its solutions Chrome extensionincluding voice typing and a voice assistant to answer your questions.

There has been an increase in the number of voice detection tools over the last 12 months due to overall improvements in the quality of speech recognition models. Speechify hooks up its wagon to this train and launches its own English-enabled dictation tool. Like other dictation tools, Speechify voice typing corrects errors and removes filler words.

During my short test, which lasted just over a day, I found that there was a lot to do in Speechify. For example, the tools work well with Gmail and Google Docs, but on sites like WordPress I had difficulty getting voice dictation to work and getting it to work 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 has noticed that its model learns faster the more you use it, and the error rate will gradually decrease.

The startup also launches a conversational voice assistant that lives in the browser sidebar. You can ask him questions about the site, such as “What are the three key ideas?” or “explain it in simpler words.”

While ChatGPT and Gemini have conversational modes, Speechify argues that their apps treat them as an add-on, with the startup's own tool having voice front and center.

“We believe that chat will always be the default UI in ChatGPT and Gemini when they open the app. This is what their users expect. Voice will always be secondary – and in many cases, an outgrowth of ChatGPT and Gemini. We know from several years of developing Speechify that there is a large portion of the market that includes our users who want voice to be the primary, default setting every time they open the app and talk to AI,” Rohan Pavuluri, the company's chief division officer, told TechCrunch by e-mail.

One noticeable issue is that Speechify Assistant does not currently work with browsers with built-in sidebar assistants such as Atlas OpenAI, Comet Perplexity, and Dia. The startup doesn't worry much about this as the extension is mainly intended for the Chrome browser and its huge user base.

Speechify said it plans to gradually incorporate voice typing and voice assistant into all of its desktop and mobile apps.

The startup also wants to develop agents who carry out tasks on your behalf. The startup didn't reveal its full roadmap, but it did give one example: making phone calls to schedule an appointment or waiting to be connected to a company's customer service. Other companies such as Truecaller and Cloacked pursue similar goals.