>I remember when I first tried the speech recog. s/w on my new 'puter a few years back. I spent AGES "teaching" it but, in the end, with my accent, it always came out with gibberish :-)

I had it for a few months (as long as the laptop from the office was in my hands), and it did pretty good, no better but not much worse as your regular OCR software. Probably aided by my somewhat harder pronunciation (dang, I'll never learn to swallow consonants in a proper Southern way, I'm not really trying). Once while I was trying it out, my daugter came in and we spoke a few sentences Serbian - bingo! The text it "recognized" was so much funnier than anything I could make up by myself. And almost made more sense :).