Voice Recognition??

Well I suppose that depends on what you mean by "satisfactroy." Many of the voice recognition programs out there today work rather well for tasks like controlling your computer. But if you are referring to speech to text recognition, then that's a different matter.

For obvious reasons, that is a difficult task. Everyone speaks differently, and the computer must "learn" how you speak before it can be any good at interpereting you. While there have been improvements in this regard, the technology still needs work.

As for free software for this, I'm not sure what is out there. I will do some research and reply again later.