SIMON vs. Windows 7 speech recognition

This comparison is based on 7 days of testing. Hopefully Simon development will follow the "Ubuntu" way. In my opinion Simon GUI can be a little confusing - a quickstart wizard and quick help on the sidebars would be greatly appreciated by end-users.

SIMON

Distribution: OSS, cross platform
Start year: 2007
Ease of use: quite hard - no demo or quickstart package (with Voxforge stuff - at least English). You should read the manual thoroughly. Don't expect quick results. If you want to test the core, just download the Julius quickstart package: http://www.voxforge.org/
Flexibility: Custom commands (programs, places, text macros, etc.)
Accuracy: After a week, it's still not sufficent (false positives, activation to wrong words or noise)

TIP: If recognition is below e.g. 85%, SIMON should drop the input and do nothing

Windows 7

Speech recognition in Windows 7 (trained for 20 minutes with reading specific text aloud + completed the tutorial that also trains the engine)
Distribution: Closed source, Windows integrated application
Start year: 1993
Ease of use: easy
Flexibility: built-in commands, Windows Speech Recognition Macros recommended
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=fad62198-220c-4717-b044-829ae4f7c125&displaylang=en
Accuracy: about 80% (without rare words and if you speak 4-5 words at a time)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Speech_Recognition

Notable incident

The use of Windows Speech Recognition during a demonstration of Windows Vista at a Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting on July 27, 2006, resulted in a well-publicized and embarrassing incident. The software failed to function correctly initially, resulting in an unintended output of "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all".^{[5] [6] [7]} A developer with Vista's speech recognition team later explained that Windows Speech Recognition's failure to function properly during the demonstration was the result of a bug in the volume control feature, which caused the application to pick up extra noise that affected its performance.^{[8] [9]} The software bug was fixed by Microsoft prior to the release of Vista to the general public.^[8]