I think there have been numerous acquisitions of voice/speech-recognition startups by both Google and Apple (http://www.enterprisemobiletoday.com/news/article.php/387924...), because indeed it's very clear that it's going to be a thing of the future, with nlp.

And we're probably not much into it just because of how impenetrably tortuous it is. Almost everything related to it is variable -- culture is always evolving language, slangs die of usage over time, and there are accents to worry about. With all of these problems, there is the demand in tandem for progress in nlp areas to deal with -- where really some of the most difficult challenges lie ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing#Con... ). With all that said, I have my money down on Google. They seem to be doing a lot of work in areas where the variability of these tasks is required. Presently, the voice transcription feature on youtube seems fairly impressive, and I've noticed in the past google search's nlp abilities to be curiously good, certainly more far ahead than any other search engine today.