Mozilla Releases Firefox Voice Assistant Beta

Mozilla has debuted voice controls for its Firefox browser. Firefox Voice is currently in beta and will likely get a more complete release after ironing out bugs and other problems with the feature.

Firefox Voice performs like a smart display voice assistant within the browser as an extension. Unlike a smart speaker, it doesn’t have a wake word, at least not yet, and is activated by clicking on the icon in the address bar. The tool is limited to the desktop version of the browser and only works in English. Once activated, the assistant will answer questions by using the default search engine or go to specific websites if it recognizes them.

Firefox Voice is built on Google Cloud Speech Service, so theoretically it can understand anything that Google has added to its platform. That also means all of the voice commands are routed through Google’s servers but doesn’t hold any records of what it processes, according to Mozilla. By default, Mozilla doesn’t hang onto the recordings either, although users can opt-in to a program where the audio will be used to improve Firefox Voice.