Dustin Coates in Code

The State of Speech to Text (STT) Browser Support in 2020

Originally Published: January 4, 2020
Last Updated: January 4, 2020

Browser	Platform	Status
Chrome	Android	Online STT
Chrome	iOS	No support
Chrome	Web	Online STT
Edge	Web	Claimed support for 76+
Firefox	Web	72+ Nightly, behind flags
Safari	Web	No support
Safari	iOS	No support

What we’ve seen over the past year is incremental improvement in browser support for speech to text. Firefox has made progress, but STT is still hidden behind flags and only in Firefox Nightly. Meanwhile, Edge (thanks to the decision to base the browser off of Chromium) now claims to support STT, but only in versions 76 and later which are still in beta as of January 2020. However, while sites will show that Edge supports STT, I couldn’t actually find any implementations that actually work, which is worse than no support at all.

Still, the biggest hold out is Safari with no sign as to when Apple will start supporting STT in the browser. This wouldn’t be a problem if this only affected those using Safari directly. However, Safari is what underpines all browsers on iOS, and so this prevents any in-browser STT on iPhones and iPads. Why? Still a mystery.