Re: Speech recognition vs providing information
I hear what you say, but when you want to do something simple handsfree, like "Call Joe Bloggs on mobile", while abroad on umpty-something quid a kilobyte data roaming charges[1], a local recog system is a "must have" unless you have very deep pockets.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. By far and away the best voice dial and other simple stuff system I have ever used was MS Voice Commander on the old WinMo platform[2]. Now, given that that was around the thick end of a decade ago and ran on hardware that took significant time to get around to twiddling its own thumbs, we're way past due for someone to do better by now.
[1] Not to mention the interminable wait for it to do its stuff over a shonky 2G connection.
[2] This even used to cope well with my mangling of non-English names, something that nothing I've tried since can handle with any degree of accuracy. Rather amusingly, it was better at getting it right than most of those systems where you had to laboriously pre-record voice tags for every contact.