> What's changed since then in terms of technology? Unless it's very significant, I suspect it will go the same way. Apart from an assistive technology viewpoin

> What's changed since then in terms of technology? Unless it's very significant, I suspect it will go the same way. Apart from an assistive technology viewpoint, my gut instinct is that it's not that satisfying or rewarding talking to a computer all day. Training data is now abundant compared to twenty years ago, and so is computation power. That means training can be much more complex now. The underlying technology is now typically neural networks (broadly speaking), whereas twenty years ago it might have been Hidden Markov Models. Overall, recognition quality, even without speaker-specific training, is now on a very different level than back then. Whether it’s considered good is a matter of opinion. But it’s significantly better than twenty years ago.