Speechify adds voice typing and voice assistant to its Chrome extension

Speechify has largely been a tool that helps you listen to articles, PDFs, and documents. The company is now adding voice detection features to its Chrome extension, including voice typing and a voice assistant that answers your questions.

In the past 12 months, there has been a proliferation of voice detection tools, thanks to the overall quality improvement in speech recognition models. Speechify is attaching its wagon to this train and launching its own dictation tool with English support. Just like other dictation tools, Speechify’s voice typing corrects errors and removes filler words.

In my short test of just over a day, I felt like there was a lot of room for improvement in Speechify. For example, the tools work well with Gmail and Google Docs, but on sites like WordPress, I had a hard time getting voice dictation to work and getting it to work well. The company said it is gradually adding optimization to popular sites.

In terms of accuracy, the word error rate was higher than some other tools such as Wispr Flow, Willow, and Monologue. Speechify notes that its model learns faster the more you use it, and the error rate will gradually decrease.

The startup is also launching a conversational voice assistant located in your browser’s sidebar. You can ask him questions about the site, such as “What are the three main ideas?” Or “Explain it in simpler terms.”

While ChatGPT and Gemini have chat modes, Speechify’s argument is that they are treated as an afterthought in their apps, and that the startup’s own tool has audio front and center.

“We believe that chat will always be the default user experience in ChatGPT and Gemini when they open apps. It’s what users expect. Voice will always be secondary — and in many cases, an afterthought to ChatGPT and Gemini. We know from several years of building Speechify that there is a large portion of the market, which includes our users, who want audio as their primary and default setting every time they open an app and talk to AI,” said Rohan Pavuluri, the company’s chief business officer. He told TechCrunch via email.

One notable drawback with this is that the Speechify Assistant does not currently work with browsers that have built-in sidebar assistants such as OpenAI’s Atlas, Perplexity’s Coment, and Dia. The startup isn’t too concerned about that because the extension is largely intended for the Chrome browser and its massive user base.

Speechify said it plans to gradually include voice typing and voice assistant in all its apps across desktop and mobile.

The startup also wants to develop into developer agents that complete tasks for you. The startup didn’t reveal its full roadmap, but it did provide one example: making calls to schedule an appointment or waiting with the company’s customer support. Other companies such as Truecaller and Cloacked were pursuing similar goals.