Offline webapps and speech UI

Hi,

I think there should a requirement to support speech UI
in offline webapps.
In practice that means local speech engines, so offline web apps
may not support all kinds of speech interactions, but basic things
could be possible.


Another possible requirement is that webapps should not know the exact
speech engine installed locally. I mean the vendor and version etc.
There are few reasons for this; webapps should just work everywhere,
no browser/speech engine specific hacks.
Another reason is that by exposing the exact vendor/version, that would
help hackers to attack against that particular system.
(I assume many speech engines are written in C/C++ or in other unsafe 
languages and may not be fuzz tested properly. Well, implementation
done in a memory safe language may still have other security bugs.
I basically want to make a new attack vector a tiny bit harder for hackers.)
Third reason would be to not add yet another way to fingerprint user.


Also, if browser doesn't use local speech engines, user should know
about it. But that might be something we can't require, but
something which UA implementors need to take care of, since it affects
also to the possible speech UI of the browser, not only webapps.
(I don't want to send any speech data to random server without knowing it. )


-Olli

Received on Wednesday, 3 November 2010 09:14:18 UTC