I've watched speech technology develop for more than 20 years. Like you, I've seen a lot of advances. Trivial by today's standards, some 20 years ago early commercially viable speech recognition systems just recognized yes/no in response to the question "You have a collect call from <John Smith>. Do you accept the charges?" And that was it. But being able to automate this simple yes/no task was a significant commercial success that boosted further investments in commercial speech recognition. By the mid-1990's computing power, more training data and refined recognition algorithms were hitting the sweet spot of automating speech recognition for much more challenging tasks including company names for stock quotes and city names for airline systems. The late 1990's delivered name recognition (even a million name dialer!) and was soon followed by address capture and voice print security systems.

Since then, the technology has advanced to provide more and more robust recognition and parsing of more complex utterances, including natural language systems in which the technology can handle wide open utterances - although still constrained to targeted commercial domains of financial services, telcos and so on.

So, when will we reach the amazing fictional speech recognition abilities we remember from "Star Trek" episodes from the 1960's? In some ways, we're already there. Today you can dictate a report, create and send an email, and find information on the web, all by just speaking commands to your phone or computer. This was pure science fiction in the 1960's. Today you can also speak to your car to control the cell phone in your pocket, or control the car's systems for navigation, entertainment, climate and so on. Controlling these capabilities by voice would seem astounding in years past yet today they're available on common cars sold in your neighborhood. (And speech technology aside, cars that today can parallel park themselves are truly amazing!)

Think back over the progress of speech technologies the last 20 years. Then imagine what might be available just ten years from now. Will we finally be able to "just talk" to a computer and have it converse with us like we dreamed of on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960's?  

Sure we will. We'll get there. Beam me up Scotty.