Sure it might work better now, but that's expected when computers are much more powerful than a pentium 100 with 32MB of RAM. Uploading voice to google servers for processing was always just a data grab.
GBoard works somewhat reliably with 0 training and my Italian accent, that's an apple to oranges comparison.
The training was in part due to the hardware limitations. Some versions let you skip the training or have only a small training session and let it learn as it went, I'd be surprised if googles systems weren't doing some sort of continuous learning too.
> and then let another person speak, possibly someone with a different accent.
It had profiles to handle that, although it needed training for each profile. With google does it automatically switch profiles or does it mess up what it's learned about you're voice? It's very opaque.
> GBoard works somewhat reliably with 0 training and my Italian accent, that's an apple to oranges comparison.
I haven't tried the new system but all of google voice recognition has struggled with my Australian accent to the point of being unusable.
You had to spend an age just training it to your own specific voice and choose microphone carefully, neither of which are steps this requires. Not to mention the syntax for punctuation etc.
So no, I would not argue this is catching up the the 90s.
They were invented in the 80's, they weren't used because of limited processing power.