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I've spent a good bit of time trying to get CMUSphinx to transcribe audio with any amount of reasonable accuracy. I never was very successful. Resorted to using paid third party APIs.

I really wish there were better options out there. Hopefully Simon will help improve the landscape. The automatic contributions to Voxforge should help.

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What third party APIs do you use? And how accurate are they in transcribing long audios with a reasonable amount of noise?

I have the most experience with Nuance's NDEV API. It is not really for very long audio. I'd say < 2 minutes.

This, and the other comments about the poor state of open-source speech recognition, are very disappointing.

Until now, I'd assumed the voice input on Android was open source. But if so it could clearly be taken and integrated into desktop apps like this. How does it actually work? Is it a closed-source plugin? Does it send a recording of what you say to a Google API?

The Voice Recognition is 1) part of the Google apps (the Google Search app) which are mostly not open source and 2) send the input to google to get analyzed

On Android 4.0 (afaik) the voice recognition is offline! But surely still a non-free Google app. :(

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