Speech Recognizer on Chromebook

MIT App Inventor Help
#1

It would be helpful to clearly list the supported features of App Inventor programs running on Chromebooks.

I had to do a lot of web searching and found an obscure posting dated from 12/2020 from someone who said he was in contact with Google and that Speech Recognizer in App Inventor would not work when run on the AI Companion App on a Chromebook.

I am asking if this is in fact true.

When I attempt to run an app with a Speech Recognizer block on my Chromebook (not using the emulator but using the AI Companion App) - I get the error:

"Activity found to handle Intent { act=android.speech.action.RECOGNIZE_SPEECH (has extras) }"

I have ensured that my mic is enabled for the Companion App.

If this is true, what other features of App Inventor will not work on Chromebooks -- why is there no formal page that shows this or discusses this?

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#2

The issue here is the speech recognition is handled by Google Play Services. Not all devices have it at all or all it's features and there's no way to know what will work ahead of time. In theory another app could provide a speech recognition service but I don't know of any that do.

#3

You are misunderstanding my issue.

I am saying that Speech to Text does not work for any App Inventor program running on with the AI2 Companion App on a Chromebook.

My point is that this is not clearly communicated anywhere -- if there are App Innventor features not supported on Chromebooks - there should be a list of the features and it should be accessible in App Inventor documentation.

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#4

Good question. Probably because so few people are working with chromebooks compared to those developers using computers with full hardware features. Chromebooks are relatively inexpensive because they lack a lot of the hardware and some software features of Windows and Mac computers. Originally, App Inventor did not run on chromebooks; MIT found a way because some schools started using them. Chromebook users are not alone; many Android operation versions where some things work but others do not. With a small staff, we cannot catch them all.

What to do? Here are the discussions others have had about chromebooks in this community https://community.appinventor.mit.edu/search?q=chromebook and a link to discussions in our previous community https://groups.google.com/g/mitappinventortest/search?q=chromebook

  • You might search these links and help other chromebook users. You could start a Things that do not work with Chromebook thread. Compile a list of things you are aware of that are issues; others can add issues too. Only a chromebook user can discover these issues. SpeechRecognizer (and SpeechToText too ?? ) seems to be features not available. When you and others discover issues; post them. :slight_smile:

  • explore. Most of the MIT tutorials that do not use sensors will run on Chromebooks. Kindly tell us what does not.

Chromebook users will appreciate the help you and others provide as will the volunteers who staff this community but who primarily use Windows and Mac. Thanks.

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#5

I know the speech recognition does not work on your (or my) device but this not an App Inventor-specific issue. No apps (App Inventor or otherwise) using the speech recognition intents will work. The most that can be done is adding a block SpeechRecognitionAvailable or something so features that require it can be hidden/disabled. Chrome does this for voice search, the mic icon is hidden on unsupported devices. This issue is not uniqe to Chromebooks and I suspect that some Chromebooks will work fine.

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