Google Operating System

Two 'Google Operating System' stories September 2011 - February 2013

Google Translate to add dialects for text-to-speech feature?

Jordan Kahn Feb 28 2013 - 1:50 pm PT

As noted by the unofficial Google Operating System blog, Google could soon add the option to select a dialect for certain languages in its text-to-speech feature within Google Translate. The option is currently hidden in Translate’s source code, according to the report, and it would allow users to hear various dialects like American, British, and Australian for English.

The text-to-speech feature will allow you to select the dialect for languages like English, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese. It’s nice to compare American English, British English and Australian English.

The report also noted hints of other features that aren’t currently available, including phrasebook and dictionary features.

Google Chrome’s future update to feature spell checker that takes context into consideration

Jake Smith Sep 1 2011 - 4:28 pm PT

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As reported by Google Operating System, Google will release a “smarter” spell checker in a future update of Chrome. Currently, Chrome only uses the dictionary to spell check, not taking context into consideration. The future update, however, will work like Google Search’s “did you mean” feature.

Google has been hesitant to add the updated spell checker citing privacy concerns. As Google Operating System explains, a JSON-RPC request is sent to the “did you mean” service in the background, where the context-menu will then be updated. It will be interesting to see how fast Google can get results to come back.