> Latency: With latency, I mean the time from when the user is done speaking to when the transcription is complete. ... While this may sound extreme, remember that producing the transcript is usually the first step in a series of expensive computations.

For many applications, making a transcription seems like an unnecessary step and source of errors. Skipping transcription when the user doesn't need it (most cases where I use it) would seem like a way to get some gain, but perhaps at the reduction of debuggability.

> For example in voice search the actual web-scale search has to be done after the speech recognition.

That's an area where literal exact transcription is usually required. But even then, Siri/Cortana/Alexa might be better off trying to figure out the meaning of what someone's asking rather than figuring out the exact words spoken in order to return the best results.

Most people are quite bad at formulating good internet searches without a lot of trial and error. Let Google listen to a person talk about the problem they have or issue and then formulate the best results for that instead of forcing us to come up with the exact right phrasing to get appropriate results. It would help tremendously with the synonym and homophone issues that are so annoying now.