Firefox’s New Voice Control Makes It As Good As a Smart Speaker
I’m used to yelling at my Google Home and Amazon Echo, not my web browser. However, Mozilla is currently testing voice control capabilities for its Firefox browser, and you can join me and yell at your screen, which is actually a little more fun and rewarding than it might seem at first glance.
To get started, open Firefox and visit the Mozilla Firefox Voice Campaign page. Click the Get Started button, enter your name and email address, and you will receive a link to download the Firefox Voice add-on:
Once you have it installed, you will need to approve several permissions before you can get started. First, it’s obvious that you need to give him access to your microphone. Mozilla will also ask if it can collect and analyze voice recordings of what you said to your browser. It does not identify you, so I’ll leave that up to you. (I don’t like it when companies have records with me, but I also doubt I would be controversial talking to my web browser.)
However, that is all you need to do. To start screaming in your browser, you can click the microphone icon in the upper right corner of the screen or press CTRL + [period]. As far as what you can tell Firefox, Mozilla has a huge list of commands you can try and the websites that support them, including:
- Internet Search (“Find Manhattan Recipes”)
- Search for information on a specific website (“Search my Gmail for tickets to Hamilton”)
- Visiting a specific web page (“Go to Lifehacker”)
- Asking the general question (“Who is David Murphy?”)
- Play music or video (“Turn Green Day on Spotify”).
- Audio or video playback control (play, mute, pause, etc.)
- Reading Websites Aloud (“Read This Page”)
- Getting a weather forecast (“What’s the temperature in San Francisco?”)
- Translation of the website into another language (“Translate this website into Spanish”)
- Route (“Find the nearest land on the maps”)
- Setting the timer (“Set the timer for five minutes”)
- Finding a tab among too many open tabs (Find Calendar Tab)
- Standard Browser Controls (“Open New Tab”)
- Copy and Paste (“Copy Screenshot of Entire Page”)
- Create shortcuts for commands (“open Lifehacker”> “Give this a name to hack”)
The only downside – marked with an asterisk – is that there is no wake word that just launches Firefox’s voice capabilities. From a privacy standpoint, this is great; however, constantly clicking an icon or pressing a keyboard shortcut is somewhat inconvenient.
I also noticed that the CTRL + [period] keyboard shortcut actually loads the context menu of my Firefox containers, not the microphone. However, you can change the microphone trigger to whatever you want by clicking the icon and then clicking the gear icon to access the add-in’s settings.
(I also recommend turning off the beep that sounds whenever you open the microphone so you don’t go crazy.)