I agree about voice recognition getting <i>much</i> better.<p>My business partner's wife is visually impaired, and he wired up his house with a whole-house stereo, mics in each room, and a speech recognition daemon, attached to each mic.  He then wrote a huge pile of scripts for things his wife might need to do.<p>Now she can ask the house about the weather, control the thermostat, check the status of the garage doors and locks, turn on/off lights, open/close blinds,  make phone calls, change the music, and a few other things I can't remember.<p>It's all a tad too expensive to be a commodity, but overall I believe it cost him something in the $40k neighborhood, which is <i>incredibly</i> reasonable for something that makes his wife far more autonomous.