If these speech to computer interfaces are so important, why don't we develop a dialect for humans to speak to computers more efficiently, kind of like the grafiti alphabet on the palm pilot but for speech?
"Was it just coincidence that computerspeak, which we'd learned with such throat wrenching difficulty, was also a complaining, niggling, nit picking noise that gave any normal human being a pain in the arse?"
Now me, I used Graffiti a ton as well as the not quite so single stroke and therefore not so patent encumbered version that MS used on their late PDAs. I even implemented my own version on an early windows touchscreen netbook (angular delta and Levenshtein distance, match) so much so that it still pollutes my hand writing to this very day. I find it elegant and immediately understandable. Every one else thinks I'm writing in pig pen cipher.