Remote speech recognition works well because you can have a massive database of samples, so you don't have to do much work. Local speech recognition doesn't have this, so you have to get by with a much smaller subset of that data.
Posted Jan 17, 2013 14:10 UTC (Thu) by redden0t8 (guest, #72783)
[Link]
To elaborate on what you said, the Terms of Service for Google, Siri, etc... make me think that they actually keep incoming voice searches as samples. They can even automatically guess whether they were successful or not based on whether you re-send a similar query.