If you’ve seen Motorola’s “Lazy Phone” ads for its Moto X, you’ll know just how silly our current “dumb” phones can be considering how much we have to interact with them with our hands in order to get anything out of them. The purpose of the commercial was to show how the Moto X has the ability to always listen to the user, making it possible to interact with it hands-free. If you’ve been envious of those with a Moto X, you won’t have to any more as Google has brought its hands-free voice control features to Google Chrome.
Google published its Google Voice Search Hotword extension for Chrome, which when it’s installed, it’ll allow the user to call their desktop or laptop running the extension by saying “OK, Google.” Once the user grabs the computer’s attention, they can then perform a voice search of anything they like, which of course includes simple things like the weather forecast, driving directions or how to properly cook a Thanksgiving turkey.
The Google Voice Search Hotword extension is currently in beta, which means if something goes wrong, you should probably shrug it off and maybe type in your search term with your hands that are probably doing nothing at the moment.