> Not nearly as fast as cloud recognition has.

How is that? Desktop systems respond quickly, cloud systems often respond after a second - it takes time for data to do a round-trip over crappy mobile connection. Mobile latency is a big thing.

I agree wrt. Cortana (and Siri, Google Now) - most of the things you use them for will require Internet access. But there are still a lot of things that you could do with voice that shouldn't require a network connection, and we're missing the ability now. Not to mention you have zero customization options for cloud-based recognition. I could make good ol' MS Speech API recognize pretty much anything I wanted it to. No problem making it recognize a limited subset of two languages at the same time. With cloud-based systems, if the voice recognition doesn't like my accent, I'm out of luck.

I was referring to the improving part. joosters said desktop recognition has been improving, I meant that cloud has been improving faster. Which is true, all the big companies are focusing on cloud-based recognition. The improvements might eventually come to desktop recognition systems, but even that's not a guarantee given where the focus seems to be.

Fair enough. I didn't realize that you were just referring to that. And I agree with your assessment about relative speed of improvement.