If you own an Android device, then you know how you can talk to Google Chrome in Android and search for anything you want. The same functionality is present in the Google Chrome for desktop computers. But in both cases, you have to click on the small microphone icon before you can speak to Google search. Now Google has released a new extension called Google Voice Search Hotword using which you can go hands free and search Google without having to click on any microphone icon or type anything.
You can download and install the Google Voice Search Hotword extension from the Google Chrome webstore website. The extension is in the beta state but you can still use it to its full functionality. The downloaded extension itself is more than 4 megabytes and makes Chrome use more system resources than usual.
Using the Google Voice Search Hotword extension is extremely easy. All you have to do is visit the Google Search webpage and speak OK Google and start speaking for the search term that you want to search Google for. Saying OK Google makes Google ready for the voice search and it listens to whatever you are going to speak next.
That’s all to it. The extension does not have any settings. In my testing I found out that this extension makes extensive use of the system resources. My PC almost hanged up while using this extension. A little investigation showed that chrome.exe process was using more than 80% of my 2.2 GHz CPU.
Google Voice Search Hotword extension is a very nice extension if you spend a lot of time searching for things on Google. But it can really slow down your PC, so you might want to disable this extension when you are not using Google Search.
You can download and install Google Voice Search Hotword from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/.