Speech recognition will change the way we interact with technology.

Although technology develops at high speed, it always takes time to reach the plateau of productivity. The level it really starts working and having impact. I am under the impression we are close to that moment with speech recognition. Our traditional ways of input are keyboard and mouse. The introduction of the tablet and smartphone has added touch. Touch is making speech recognition more important. It's really useful in overcoming the limitations of a touch interface. You can roughly distinguish in two types of voice recognition in my view. The first one is dictation or text entry. The second one is giving commands or executing searches. Especially in the second category developments are going fast. Apple was the first with Siri quickly followed by Google/android with their efforts. For example in voice search on both iOS and android. The recent MotoX phone by Motorola/Google is build around speech recognition. It's constantly listening to your voice and reacting to commands if necessary. Also the development of Siri is going on. It will be interesting to see how this "race" develops. If I extrapolate a bit, with current capabilities of mentioned platforms in mind, it's not far fetched that in a few years I will just be talking to my smartphone like: "Okay Google, please order two tickets for the concert of Prince at the Stadium this saturday, oh and also make reservations at Gauchos, for two persons at eight." Now project this on how government and business develop their interaction layer with customers/citizens. They are just in the phase of making sites ready for the mobile platform/tablets. I think it's time to start thinking about what speech recognition could add to the mix. How it could change we interact.
It offers a lot of chances to cross the digital divide to customers/citizens. You don't need a lot of digital skills to talk. Ofcourse we have some way to go, speech interpretation is still clumsy sometimes. Key will be the cloud computing power and clever algorithms a company can employ for speech recognition. Google is (as often) in the best position to be succesful. It has an immense cloud infrastructure already for search. The way current voice search works on both iOS and Android is an indicator of how succesful they could become with this technology. Try it, it really works now.
My earliest memory of speech recognition is the computer in Blake's Seven, a cult sci-fi series, i watched with my dad,  i remember my fascination with Blake's computer (picture added),
you could just talk with it. We are getting faster there then I expected.