Has it ever happened to you? You have 10 or 15 tabs open in your browser, and one of them starts to play really annoying music through your speakers over the sound of the music or video you are playing.
You click through all of the tabs to figure out which one is doing it, and you have to shut down most of them before you figure out which one was the guilty party. There has to be a better way than this, right?
Google Chrome thinks so, too. A new feature is being tested in Chrome that would put a small visual indicator on any tabs that are generating audio. It already is up and running in the most recent Chromium and Canary test builds for Chrome. This means that there is a good shot that we will see this in an upcoming Chrome release soon.
Google, which just rolled out another refresh of Panda, says this new feature is mostly intended to assist Chrome in keeping track of tabs that are being used for playing or recording audio. This way it will not discard those tabs when memory runs short. But it also will be a sanity saver for regular Chrome users.
In other Chrome news, version 25 of the browser was just released this week and it includes voice recognition support. This means that a developer can integrate voice recognition into their Web apps. One example was seen in a Google demo. It allows you to create a new email with your voice through Chrome 25. You click on the microphone and speak. You see your words show up in a text box, and you click the mic icon again when done.
In early usage tests, the accuracy level for dictated emails was fairly high and there were only a few mistakes. There was no easy way to correct mistakes in the demo, but the promise of the technology is clear. Between this new technology and the promise of Google Glass, the future looks very interesting for the search giant.