[thomasfoster96]

Yeah, Chrome implements it as a web service, but Google and Apple have been slowly working on a Web Speech API for a while (I suppose Mozilla and Microsoft see it as an unnecessary abstraction when the Web Audio API could do speech-related stuff).

I think Safari has only implemented the Synthesis part of the API because it can all be done offline and rely on the system voices on OS X and iOS. Google uses their own web APIs and thus also does Speech Recognition, but it doesn't work well offline or when you don't have Google API keys within Chromium/Chrome.