Experimenting lately, I have been talking to my computer.
Every Mac includes something called Speakable Items. Essentially you can say things like "Get my mail" or "Switch to TextMate" and it will do it. In System Preference, Speech you can turn it on and look at the help to figure out how to use it.
Essentially: it sucks and I love it.
It sucks, because it's buggy and it doesn't know how to isolate a voice. I love it because it could keep me from typing as much as I do.
In the end, I don't think I can use it on a daily basis, but it has changed my mind about speech recognition's usefulness.
While I don't know if I could use dictation too much, I do like the idea of asking what the temperature, time, do I have new email, and other short questions or commands.
Is anyone working on something like this? Is there research to improve this?
I am very interested in speech commands now and I would love to see progress on this in the near future.