I think you have the a similar perspective to mine on this, Chris. I can see the value of voice recognition today in some rather specific circumstances: situations where specific/structured commands can be given and where other forms of interaction (E.G.: keyboard) would distract the human. But the technology really isn’t very much use for “general purpose” functions like operating a home computer or transcribing text documents/emails.

Despite this, I do believe there is value in stretching the boundaries a bit. I spent an hour or so again playing with Vista’s voice recognition, and was able to dictate several fairly lengthy blocks of text without error. A big part of the challenge the Vista voice recognition thing has is that it is both trying to transcribe what I say, as well as pick up command patterns that tell it what to do. So I can tell it part way through a paragraph “select from ‘fairly’ to ‘error’- delete”, and it will try to distinguish that command sequence from my normal speech. It often doesn’t succeed, but…I doubt even just the basic recognition part would have been achievable five years ago with off-the-shelf gear. Without someone thinking it is worth the effort, I guess that progress wouldn’t have occurred. And I could see a time in, say, five or ten years, when the number of errors would approach zero.

If the “natural language recognition” part was 100%, the “talking to an idiot” part would be less of an issue. Even then, though…do I really want a computer to capture my spoken thoughts? When I’m typing, I edit and re-think things several times: when I speak, I stumble around, backtrack, and generally weave a crooked path. I suppose having a system that was smart enough to figure out what I really *meant* would be ideal…but I imagine the computer would shortly thereafter begin to wonder what value the human was adding to the process 😉