Voice Search in Chrome Extensions Is Harder Than It Looks

I thought this was just an hour of work. It wasn't. Here's everything that went wrong and what actually worked in the end. Starting with the obvious choice window.SpeechRecognition is built into Chrome. No API keys, no server, completely free. It felt like the perfect starting point for adding voice search to my extension. After a day of testing, I dropped it. The mic permission popup was all over the place. Sometimes it would show up randomly mid-session. Sometimes it would just stop listening with no error, no warning, nothing. Results were different depending on the machine and OS. For a new tab extension that's meant to feel polished, that just wasn't good enough. I switched to Deepgram's Nova-3 model. It's fast, accurate, and sends results back in real time over WebSocket, so you don't have to wait for a full sentence before seeing any output. But now I needed a server, which kicked off a whole chain of problems. Why you can't call Deepgram directly from the extension Chrome exten