Incubation: Web Speech API: On-Device Recognition Quality

[evanbliu]

Explainer

https://github.com/WebAudio/web-speech-api/blob/main/explainers/quality-levels.md

The explainer

• Includes the information requested by the Explainer Explainer.
• Follows the Web Platform Design Principles.
• Includes or links to answers to the Security/Privacy Questionnaire.
• Describes user research you did to validate the problem and/or design.

Where and by whom is the work is being done?

• GitHub repo: https://github.com/WebAudio/web-speech-api/
• Primary contacts: Evan Liu (evliu@google.com), Google, Author
• Organization/project driving the design: Google Chrome
• This work is being funded by: Google
• Incubation and standards groups that have discussed the design: Audio WG, TPAC 2025
• Standards group(s) that you expect to discuss and/or adopt this work when it's ready: Audio WG

Feedback so far

• Multi-stakeholder feedback:
  • Chromium comments: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/69694ed0.050a0220.f8796.0337.GAE%40google.com
  • Mozilla comments: Not yet, (unofficially favorable)
  • WebKit comments: Not yet
• Major unresolved issues with or opposition to this design: N/A

You should also know that...

Summary: Extends the SpeechRecognition interface by adding a 'quality' property to SpeechRecognitionOptions. This allows developers to specify the semantic capability required for on-device recognition (via processLocally: true). The proposed quality enum supports three levels: 'command', 'dictation', and 'conversation'.

Specification URL: https://webaudio.github.io/web-speech-api

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Track conversations at https://tag-github-bot.w3.org/gh/w3ctag/design-reviews/1189

[christianliebel]

Hi @evanbliu, thank you for your proposal.

We have one question regarding privacy: Could an attacker fingerprint the user’s browsing history by installing certain or rare languages along with model qualities on site A, and checking for the availability of those permutations on site B? And if so, how is that fingerprinting concern mitigated?

It would be great if you could add a security & privacy questionnaire and answer that question.