I’ve been using voice recognition, on and off, for over a year now. It has advanced way beyond what I would have dreamed. I mentioned it to my mother and she said, “Yeah, that’s great to hear. It’ll put me out of a job.”
I was sorry to hear that, but it sounds like we ALL could save our typing fingers from overuse. It also helps me practice at speaking clearly, as it doesn’t like when you mumble.
VoxForge was set up to collect transcribed speech for use with Free and Open Source Speech Recognition Engines (on Linux, Windows and Mac).
We will make available all submitted audio files under the GPL license, and then ‘compile’ them into acoustic models for use with Open Source speech recognition engines such as Sphinx, ISIP, Julius and HTK (note: HTK has distribution restrictions).
I’d be very disappointed in myself if I didn’t donate my time to this.
Wikipedia has a nice list of other Voice Recognition projects for Linux.