I think it's telling that you choose to use examples that are, in almost every case, more than 5 years old when discussing the utter failure of voice recognition. Run your own test and see, rather than just report on others' reports of failure. Spend 5-10 minutes training the speech recognition in Windows 7 and then try dictating your blog post. I suspect that you'll find, if you do an honest attempt rather than deliberately trying to foul it up, that the recognition quality is very good. I should also mention here that your thesis is a little confused. Are you attacking voice recognition (which really means identifying a voice), speaker-independent speech recognition (what Star Trek led you to dream of) or speaker-dependent speech recognition (which is what Windows 7 or Dragon Dictate offer)? Voice recognition software is actually quite reliable these days, although most of us have no use for it. Speaker-independent speech recognition is what really sucks, unless you constrain it to a very limited input set such as numbers for telephone IVR systems. Ultimately, I suspect that if you had pain when operating a keyboard, you'd start finding alternatives like speech recognition a far more worthwhile investment of your time and energy - and then you'd be pleasantly surprised by how effective it can be.