The Promise of Speech Recognition?

Many of us watched Captain Kirk or Scotty on Star trek ask the ship's computer "computer, where is the ship's engineer?", or Captain Picard tell his food synthesizer to make him an "Earl grey, hot!" How far are we from such a scenario?

Anandtech has a good article on the current state of the art as reflected by two of today's leading speech recognition application suites from the standpoint of accuracy and performance.

Recognizing speech accurately is one aspect of speech recognition, and "natural language understanding" is quite another. While we are still quite a long way from achieving true natural language understanding by computers, there are tremendous opportunities to create intuitive interfaces for humans to interact with computers.

UmeSkype embodies an attempt to identify high level tasks that users perform in specific applications (in this case Skype) and provide a spoken interface to them.