>>The main reason why speech recognition is doing even worse than OCR is that they always start developing it from English. In many other languages, that shouldn't present much of a problem. There are just so many ways to spell the same sound, if ewe... yue... yoo... u... you get my drift.
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>Beyond phonetics, there are semantic ambiguities, colloquialisms, figures of speech, metaphors, euphemisms, and other creative absurdities. You're right, though. If we could just agree on a very boring, unambiguous flavor of Esperanto instead of English, things would be a lot simpler. But it might take some of the fun out of life, and I doubt that society will accept a language that deprives us of BS.

Believe me, I lived in a couple of those nonambiguous languages, and they are just as much fun, if not more so. But then, in those languages, you don't have to code workarounds in almost every paragraph to avoid being taken wrong.

For example: why are the roads "under construction"? It surely doesn't mean some construction is laid upon them. The roads are just being built, or (a)mended, not constructed. But the road can't be "under building" because the word "building" is anything but a process of something being built - it's a house. And it's not "under ammendment" either, because that word is reserved for legal matters. So it's under construction. To compare, in Serbian "radovi na putu" (labors on the road), in Hungarian "útépítés" (roadbuilding), and I think in German it was also a single word, forgot what it was.

Why do we have primary keys when there are no primary keyholes?
Why are Windows singular?
Why is it "a savings"?
Why do we have soup served in china? Can't we have it served a bit closer? I'd like my soup in served in florida, so it would stay warm.

And I haven't even started on the shortage of suffices in English. The same suffix, -s, denotes third person of present tense in verbs, plural in nouns, and serves as possesive suffix (with an apostrophe, though - but sounds exactly the same). Then, another suffix, -er, is used for adjectives' comparative, and as a general suffix for names of tools (based on what they do), and also of people (based on what they do) (sic!). So what's a "hair cutter"? A tool or a person? Or, "it makes a tiger tamer" - what does that mean, "it makes the tool for taming tigers", "it makes a person who tames tigers", or "it makes the tiger less wild"?

I've deliberately taken such examples where just a few words have to carry some meaning - because that's what we see every day: roadsigns, soundbites, and sentences with the funny (tm) or (r) character attached. And what we have to do - no matter how great is the resolution, nobody will put three lines on a commandbutton. We have to be short and to the point... and to-the-point (because without the dashes, I ask myself "to the point of what?"), and English seems to be the language where only the brave can keep doing it and remain unscathed.