Be careful venting your frustrations with modern technology when using the latest version of Google Chrome, released today. Chrome 11 (download for Windows | Mac | Linux) comes with the ability to convert your speech to text, which could prove to be a big boon to people who have difficulty with keyboards as well as providing on the go translations when used with Google Translate.

The new feature, based in HTML5, requires a microphone icon embedded in the Web page. Click the icon and then speak into your computer's mike. The input records as text, and the browser automatically inserts the text into the available form field.

You can test this by going to Google Translate and clicking the microphone icon in the lower right corner of the text field. At the time of writing, the microphone and voice-to-HTML feature appears to work only with English.

While the feature is interesting to include in a browser, it's hardly a random decision on Google's part. By including a speech-to-text feature, the Chrome OS instantly provides a modicum of accessibility for users who have difficulty with keyboards. When the browser is the operating system, being able to speak to the computer and have the computer know how to interpret that speech is a quick way to ensure a broader appeal.

Other changes in Chrome 11 include the introduction of hardware accelerated 3D CSS, bug fixes in cloud print, a security update to the built-in version of Adobe Flash, and user agent string changes introduced to bring Chrome in line with user agent changes made in Firefox 4. The jump from Chrome 11 beta to stable also includes 25 security changes, including 15 marked as high risk. These fixes cover potential risks such as URL bar spoofing during navigation errors, and numerous instances of stale pointers in PDF forms, sandboxing, and drop-down list handling.

Google has been moving forward with its less stable versions of Chrome too. It recently bumped Google Chrome Canary version 13 (Windows download only), the first version of Chrome to reach that milestone. Chrome Canary 13 doesn't appear to have any features different from Chrome dev 12 at this time.

Google Chrome dev 12.0.742.9 (download for Windows | Mac | Linux) includes tweaks to the Sync interface, introduces a new version of the V8 JavaScript engine, and has been offering a still-in-development feature that lets users select multiple tabs at once. There's also an experimental "new tab" page, which users can activate through the about:flags configuration screen, and a multiple profile option for having different user profiles under the same Windows log-in. Currently, this is available only on the Windows version of Chrome dev, though like speech-to-HTML it has bigger implications for Chrome OS.

Google Docs for Android dropped today, which means frequent collaborators can rejoice.

The app appears to be complete with all of our favorite core Google Docs features: creating, editing, uploading, and sharing documents. In addition, it comes stocked with an optional home screen widget for a one-touch way to create new documents, access starred documents, or take and upload photos.

One really exciting feature is the app's ability to connect with your device's camera, and use optical character recognition (OCR) to turn photos with text into editable Google documents.

Google claims the technology will get better at recognizing unformatted text (and hopefully handwriting?) over time, so this could potentially be a prelude to a whole new form of collaboration. We'll wait and see.

Google Docs for Android is currently available for phones running Android 2.1+. Stay tuned for a more in-depth hands-on look.

Originally posted at Android Atlas

For privacy fans or others who want to keep their computers free of traces of what they've been doing online, Google's Chrome browser is getting an option to make sure Adobe Systems' Flash Player isn't getting in the way.

Web sites often store details about a user in small text files called cookies that can record details such as usernames, browsing history, and advertisements that have been seen. But storage abilities in Flash mean that even if a person deletes regular cookies, a Web site could reconstruct particulars from Flash data. There are other storage mechanisms arriving in browsers, too, leading to the term "evercookie," but Adobe is trying to take care of its responsibilities with a beta of Flash Player 10.3 that lets browsers delete that data.

Now Chrome is getting a checkbox to take advantage of that feature.

"As of this week's Chrome Dev channel release, you can delete local plug-in storage data (such as Flash LSOs [local storage objects]) from within Chrome by clicking Wrench > Tools > Clear browsing data and selecting 'Delete cookies and other site and plug-in data,'" said Chrome programmer Bernhard Bauer in a blog post yesterday. Chrome also can be set to delete such data when people shut down the browser.

So far, Flash is the only known plug-in that takes advantage of the feature, Bauer said.

Mozilla helped Adobe and Google develop the feature, so expect Firefox, too, to add support at some stage for the Flash data deletion feature.

Originally posted at Deep Tech