[drincognito]

How accurate is text recognition (could you use it for dictation?) and how fast between the end of a command and recognition/parsing of said command?

[JetSpiegel]

If you want to do dictation, you can use the Sphinx4 project. It's in Java, and you have to write a bit of code, but it's an offline recognizer, you record the audio and then it doesn't run in real-time.