DEV Community: Arun Prakash Pandey

What happened when I used the Web Speech API?

Arun Prakash Pandey — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 11:16:55 +0000

Behind the scene : The Goal...

I wanted to make a web app for my personal use, which involved

Continuously listen to the user’s speech
Convert it to text in real-time
Track the frequency of a specific word (e.g., “Shiv”)
Display that count on screen and store it locally

Simple idea. Surprisingly tricky to implement.

Expectations vs Reality

The app technically worked using the Web Speech API. It listened, transcribed, and returned results. However, instead of processing each word as it was spoken, it:

Listened to full chunks of speech
Waited for pauses or silence
Then returned a batch of words all at once

Even with { continuous: true }, the speech recognition didn’t behave the way I expected — no real-time, word-by-word updates.

Findings

It is not reliable for low-latency, high-frequency word detection

The Web Speech API buffers audio and processes it after short silences.
It often fails to keep up with fast, continuous speech.
Repeating the same word (e.g., "Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv Shiv") often causes the recognizer to combine or ignore duplicates.

Solution

Stream Audio → Transcribe → Return Text

Use a Cloud-Based Speech-to-Text API
Run an OpenAI whisper STT model on a server locally.
Stream the voice data using a websocket to the backend.
Backend transcribes the speech and sends reponse to the browser.

Result

Understood the limitations of the web speech api and will work on the project with a fresh start.

Install node js ubuntu

Arun Prakash Pandey — Sun, 08 Oct 2023 10:30:29 +0000

This is a guide to installing node js on a Ubuntu machine. You can keep multiple versions of node simultaneously and switch between them as per the requirement.
Follow the below steps for installation :

Run the command ensuring your system is up to date.

sudo apt update

To install the latest stable version, run the command

sudo snap install node --classic

or Visit the Official Snap website to see the list of available versions.

To confirm the installed version of node, run the command

node -v

In case you wish to have more than one version of node installed. Run the command

nvm install v19.9.0

Here v19.9.0 is used as an example and can be replaced by a version of your choice!

To see all the available versions, use the command

nvm list-remote

To see the list of node versions that are installed on your pc, run the command

nvm ls

A similar result to the below image will appear.

To switch between the versions of node, run the command

nvm use v19.9.0

Here v19.9.0 can be replaced with any other version of node that is installed on the system.

Thanks for reading this. I hope this was helpful. Any comments or reactions will be wholeheartedly appreciated.

Updating Discord on Ubuntu

Arun Prakash Pandey — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 11:35:06 +0000

The Discord app does not get updated automatically. Instead, a copy of .deb file is downloaded and the update needs to be installed manually. If you have come across this image

Follow the below simple easy steps :

Download the .deb file
Go to the downloads folder and open the terminal. This is to ensure that you have changed your present working directory!
Type the command sudo apt install ./ make sure to include the .deb file after ./ as shown in the below image.
Hit Enter and it's done. You should see the below result after Hitting enter.

Push, Pop, Shift, Unshift : An Easy way to remember

Arun Prakash Pandey — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 11:22:23 +0000

JavaScript can be confusing in the beginning and this article will help you to easily remember & differentiate between the push(), pop(), shift() and unshift() methods.

Push() and Unshift()-> 'u' is common

The trick is to observe that the letter U is used to spell push and unshift. Hence, they have similar use cases.

For Adding one or more elements in the array.
Returns the length of the new array.
Push() adds elements to the end.
Unshift() adds elements to the beginning.

Now, you know an easier way to remember push() and unshift() methods. The pop and shift can be easily associated with each other.

Pop() and Shift() ->

The trick is to see that unlike push() and unshift() method (where the letter 'u' is common). Nothing is matching here. So, we can keep the pop and shift method in one group. Their use cases are similar as follows:

Both are used for removing.
Returns the item that was removed.
Pop() removes from the end.
Shift() removes from the start of the array.

I hope this helps you to easily remember the methods and their uses.
Feel free to reach out for feedback (good or bad), or just to connect.