Mozilla warned users about soon stopping the Speech Proxy server, providing the add-ons Voice Fill and Firefox Voice . The service will be shut down on 28 February. The add-on source code will remain in the repositories and continue shipped under a free MPL license.
In the near future, it is planned to publish an update to the Voice Fill and Firefox Voice add-ons, in which a notice of the termination of their development and support will be displayed. Moreover, on February 19, the process of automatic removal of these add-ons will be initiated, which will be uninstalled from browsers without explicit user participation.
As a reminder, the Firefox Voice add-on developed an experimental voice navigation system that allows you to use speech commands to perform various actions in the browser. The addition differed from typical voice control systems in its orientation not to creating a voice replacement for a mouse and keyboard, but to processing questions in natural language, acting as a voice assistant. For example, the user could send commands such as “what is the weather”, “find a tab with Gmail”, “mute”, “save as PDF”, “open mozilla site”, etc.
The Voice Fill add-on offered a voice input system that allows you to fill out forms on websites and enter text using Mozilla’s speech recognition system. Recognition was carried out on the Mozilla server, to which the data recorded from the microphone was sent.
Optional, note that the decommissioned server was also used to support the experimental API WebSpeech , with which web applications could manipulate voice data and perform operations such as speech synthesis and recognition.