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In Chrome, google.com has a microphone search feature, as seen here: Google Search with microphone

In Firefox though, it doesn't: Google Search with no microphone

In Firefox, I tried setting the user agent to Chrome's (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36) in about:config > general.useragent.override expecting to receive the page served to Chrome, and now it weirdly flickers as shown here https://youtu.be/UpYh20YVIh4

What is causing this?

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  • Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking. Commented Apr 15, 2023 at 21:53
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    By the way, recent versions of Firefox (e.g. 133.0.3) no longer seem to have this issue. Commented Dec 12, 2024 at 13:29

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I was able to get the microphone icon to stay by enabling (setting to True) those two in addition to changing the User Agent:

media.webspeech.recognition.enable media.webspeech.recognition.force_enable

However, it was still not getting the audio from my microphone, it just said waiting: enter image description here

Based on online chatter, this has to do with the way the Speech-to-text service works, and cannot work on Firefox (and it also doesn't work on many Chromium based browsers, like Opera and Vivaldi.)

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  • How does the Speech-to-text service work? Commented Apr 19, 2023 at 18:16
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    On Chrome it is using the Web Speech API see info developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Speech_API/… (and demo google.com/intl/en/chrome/demos/speech.html) Commented Apr 19, 2023 at 18:21
  • why doesn't firefox support this? Commented Apr 19, 2023 at 18:25
  • The reason is that it is not a local (computer program, which Firefox is) thing, Google uses a server-based recognition engine for this, so for Mozilla to develop that it's a whole different ball game. And it's also a whole new machine learning project to be able to recognize speech. Commented Apr 19, 2023 at 18:37
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    At some point they tried, see wiki.mozilla.org/Web_Speech_API_-_Speech_Recognition, not sure why that didn't work out. It's possible that Google didn't allow them to Commented Apr 19, 2023 at 18:49
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  1. In the address bar, type about:config and press Enter and click Accept the Risk and Continue to enter the settings page.

  2. type: media.webspeech.recognition.enable and set to true

  3. type: media.webspeech.recognition.force_enable and set to true

  4. Install New Tab Override

  5. On the setting page of extention in URL bar fill: https://www.google.com/webhp

DONE - See here

Open a new page and you will see the Google Search bar with an active microphone. Click on the microphone and use it. This works for me.

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  • Your answer made me check the current status, and apparently, on Firefox 129, it's working with these 2 parameters even set to false. I don't know if it has something to do with an extension I'm using, but I don't think so. Commented Aug 16, 2024 at 16:36

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