One useful area where Linux lags behind Mac and Windows

I have been a Linux user for years, but there is one useful functionality that has mostly been missing on Linux - voice recognition and dictation. Ever since IBM discontinued ViaVoice for Linux (I still have my old CD set in fond hopes that I might be able to use it - but each glibc and java (I do not understand this obsession some commercial vendors have with java - makes everything slow and buggy) upgrade makes that more and more unlikely),

2001 was a heady time for this - ViaVoice and XVoice. I remember dictating some of my longer reports into emacs at the time. But right now, there appears to be absolutely nothing. Google search just yields a pooload of outdated pages about ViaVoice. CMU Sphinx is not mature and there are some rumors that it has been abandoned. I tried a version of it a few months ago and it is kid stuff (putting it mildly) compared to what ViaVoice was.

I do not much care for games, video editing etc. (even though decent ones in either exist for Linux). But voice recognition is a very useful function to have, especially for busy people who sometimes need to type long documents. I do remember that there were some rumors a few months ago that the new version of KDE (I am *NOT* talking about kttsd) was going to include this functionality, but I have not read anything since. Maybe it was just limited stuff for hotkeys voice recognition dictation software (preferably open source) for Linux any time soon ? And no, Wizzscribe is NOT it - it is something for developers and even that costs more than $2K. Out of reach for a normal user.

There is an older report about voice recognition with Qt :

But since IBM bailed out, and there has been no talk since about Qt (checked Trolltech's website), I do not imagine anything came of it.