Voice control quite buggy (Christopher)

[selfthinker]

Christopher's profile uses a voice control extension called "Handsfree for Web". When it works it works really well, but unfortunately it is quite buggy:

• It often crashes and has to be restarted.
• Even when it's restarted, it sometimes doesn't react at all. (The microphone icon doesn't even show or it's sleeping and "wake up" doesn't work.)
• When it works fine at first, it starts to lag more and more after a while until it gets restarted.

I've looked at a lot of similar tools and this was the best I could find. Maybe it's worth looking further for a replacement. But first we should contact the author as he seems pretty responsive in the tool's forum. (I'm only waiting until this project is completely live.)

[selfthinker]

Another very promising but ultimately unworkable solution is using Android's "Voice Access".
Chromebooks can have access to the Play Store and install it, but it only works with the Android side of things, so not with the version of Chrome that is already on a Chromebook. It does work with an Android version of Chrome, though. But Android Chrome changes some behaviour (and looks) so is unfamiliar and not very reliable to show the bad examples. For example, tooltip on hover turns into tooltip on click.

[BNewing]

I'm also having issues with the Christopher set up. On our Chromebooks, the Handsfree Extension seems to block being able to scroll down. When you say a command it recognises, a small green box appears at the bottom of the screen - but from what I can tell, this then alters what the plugin perceives to be the bottom of the screen, and prevents you from scrolling past what is already visible.

I don't know if this is just specific to the devices we have. Details of the laptops are:

• Chrome version: 75.0.3770.144
• Chrome Android SKD version: 25

It could also be user error...!