&gt; Voice recognition that only runs client-side and lacks all the advantages a centralised service can provide?<p>By the way, my impression from talking to someone in the know was that Google has been developing client-side voice recognition that is only a about couple of years behind their cloud voice recognition in quality.  (The client-side service still requires the huge amounts of voice data to be used to train the software, but it can run offline on a cell phone processor.)  Right now being two years behind in quality is quite noticeable, but that will change soon once quality plateaus near perfect, and client-side voice recognition will make sense again.<p>Just rumors though.