[quote=ocrenter]seems like Nuance has a monopoly on speech recognition and doing a horrible job of it.
would be nice if there will be a viable open source competition.[/quote]
That seems to be the case. One or two companies/products I stumbled upon are now part of Nuance. I was even shocked when my favorite editor, Swype, was acquired by them last year.
I am looking for interesting university projects that might be helpful. I also plan to look into Asterisk for possible solutions.