"Do you talk to your computer often?" my sister asked yesterday when we were chatting on the phone. She heard me swearing at it when I was in the middle of attempting to upgrade to Windows 7. The truth is I do talk to my computer frequently ("please don't crash, not now, please"). The problem is it rarely understands me, and almost never listens, even if it does. Voice recognition software has promised to change all that - it even got snuck into Vista. But, the truth is more than ten years since I first tried voice recognition, its results have been pretty comical.