Google Chrome may soon add a built‑in voice typing feature on Windows 11

Google Chrome is working on a “Voice Typing” feature for Windows 11 that lets users speak into a microphone to enter text on their PC, rather than typing on a keyboard.

Microsoft Edge has had a voice typing feature for some time, which you can use at any time to dictate by pressing Windows + H. You need to have Online Speech Recognition enabled in Windows privacy settings to use it. The feature works everywhere, including all browsers, where you need to press the keyboard shortcut. Google, however, is developing its own dictation feature for voice typing.

How you could use Voice Typing in Chrome

It is still early, but in our testing on Windows, similar to Edge, you need to place the text cursor in a text box, right-click, and select “Start dictation.” Chrome then displays an “Initializing” state for speech-to-text. The feature does not move beyond the Initializing state when the option is selected, based on our observations.

Chrome could simply offer a dictation option in text box right-click menus and let users use the Windows-provided experience. However, Google appears to have other plans. Based on Chromium Gerrit changes spotted by us at Windows Report, Google is working on a dedicated dictation bubble, waveform animations, and support for voice-driven text editing commands in addition to the Start dictation option.

Google Workspace, including Google Docs, already offers a Voice Typing feature, but the Chrome implementation is separate and designed to work directly in browser text fields.

To turn on Voice Typing in Chrome, you may need to enable the Dictation flag once it becomes available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and ChromeOS.

While we can’t confirm how the dictation UI or implementation will look on other platforms such as Chrome on Mac, Linux, and ChromeOS, our testing is based on the feature spotted on Windows 11. Things may vary when Google ships the feature to those platforms in the future. The company has not announced an ETA.