There are certain problems that computer technology might never be able to solve. Speech recognition might get further than it is today, but I think it's unlikely that a computer will ever understand fully natural speech. That is unless AI will become reality (which I very much doubt).
Serious work on AI started in the 1950s so it's been over 50 years with relatively little progress comparing to other areas of computing. After all 50 years is like five centuries in computing history (the World Wide Web was not made public until 1991!). The web evolved to the point it is at now in only 15 years (I bet nobody in 1991 even imagined things like blogging or youtube), but as far as AI goes there are still no computers that can pass the Turing test which was introduced in 1950!
The concept behind the Turing test is that a human judge chats by text to two "people" in a different room. One of them is a human and one is a computer. If the judge is not sure which is which then the computer has passed the test. Alan Turing who thought of this test (and did a number of other amazing things relating to computers) apparently predicted that computers would eventually be able to pass the test thanks to memory power alone, but so far it has not happened.
(Alan Turing is btw a very sad story. He was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexuality and then committed suicide - or so many think - in 1954 aged just 42. Quite a way to lose somebody of such importance to science, ha?)
Anyway, really what I wanted to post is not all these ramblings (which to be honest I'm in no way qualified to be writing and may have just as well given you incorrect information :-/), but a video of how Speech Recognition works on Windows Visa (and I mainly wanted to post it because I think it's funny ;)):
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