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Here you go: Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

It's really impressive how this piece of AI software can, like, understand what you say and stuff.

I have a lot of friends who have sprint phones with voice nav. They all used it for the first week because it was "cool" but after awhile, they went back to traditional methods. Another example is my father; he got the 02 Infinity Q45 which has loads of tech toys built in. The voice nav is really cool but it's not nearly as fast a clicking a button.

Processing power: this is a nuisance. It's not that you can't get enough processing power into a handheld or cellphone these days, but:

• You can't get the resources you can on a desktop, which means you're likely to do worse on large vocabulary tasks than desktop products.
• The cost of the processing power makes it hard to put the speech recognition where you really want it. (Someone else mentioned cell-phones: in the U.S., at least, all but the highest-end cell phone hardware is extremely cost-sensitive, since it winds up being subsidized by service providers. Does higher-end speech recognition offer enough value to offset the added hardware cost?

User expectations (a.k.a., the Star Trek problem, a.k.a., even that clunker without circuit breakers that Kirk talked to could always understand him perfectly): This is a general speech-recognition problem, but it gets more intense the more mass-market you go. Palm pilots are largely successful because they don't try to do too much, but do what they do well. It's hard to set that kind of expectation reasonably for nontrivial speech recognition. Even worse, I think that people are actually more demanding of a self-contained special-purpose device (with more limited resources, as above) than they are of general PC software.

User interface design: this is still a largely unsolved problem; how do you really want to interact with a PDA by voice? It's hard to arrange a device so you can look at it and be close to the microphone at the same time, which complicates the picture. Dragon Systems back in their pre-acquisition days sold a product called "Dragon NaturallySpeaking Mobile Organizer" that was an interesting step along the way. They didn't put the speech recognition into the handheld -- speech was recorded into a handheld recorder, recognized on a PC and synched up with PDA later -- but the product did attempt to deal with the interface questions of large-vocabulary PDA-based speech recognition; e.g., when you say something, is it intended for your calendar, your email, or your address book? How many variations of "next Tuesday" can the device understand? The general interface problem, once everything's in the same device, is still open and interesting.

In the case of Carnivore, well, it's part of the "DragonWare Tools". In the English article, the speech to text converter mentioned is made by Dragon Systems.

Ok, there's probably no relation, but being a bit paranoid and enjoying a good (or not so good) conspirancy theory like many slashdot readers, I thought I'd mention it. Maybe Carvivore 3.x will also intercept streaming audio, internet radio, voice over IP, etc... all with textual keyword searches and whatnot. Even if they're not the same Dragon, it's still not a giant stretch to envision capturing multimedia formats (with keyword matches) in real time... but if they are the same Dragon it'd be only a stone's throw away....

I believe he uses one of the Dragonsys products. Email me if you want me to get more details from him.

Dragon Systems (makers of Naturally Speaking continuous VR) announced a similar product at Comdex. They call it audiomining.

Dragon Systems (makers of Naturally Speaking continuous VR) announced a similar product at Comdex. They call it audiomining.