Up until yesterday I thought the Japanese I spoke was fairly close to the way a native speaker would speak. I was wrong.

Yesterday my girlfriend showed me the speech recognition feature on her iTouch. She demonstrated by speaking a few long sentences that were subsequently translated into garbled English. I understood exactly what she was saying so I thought the machine was broken. I then read a long passage and, lo and behold, the machine translated it perfectly! I was shocked.

We then did the reverse: I spoke in Japanese and so did she. I said my favorite phrase: child cat (kodomo neko) and was shocked when the machine didn’t translate it perfectly. I tried it twelve times – each time the machine gave a different answer – in a row until I could finally get the machine to understand me. My girlfriend then proceeded to try: First she tried to say it correctly, and then she repeated the word again incorrectly to make fun of my pronunciation. The machine recognized both versions perfectly. I was shocked, again.

I practiced those two words all night and, finally, in the morning, I was able to reproduce them accurately enough for the machine to understand three times in a row. It was a humbling reality check.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGxKhUuZ0Rc

I propose it might not you be you :P

I don't think I'd be too hard on yourself about it. Voice recognition can be very inaccurate even for native speakers. If other people can easily understand what you say, then I wouldn't feel too insulted if a computer can't. In fact, if a computer can always understand what you're saying then you probably sound very funny when you're speaking to actual people.

I agree with josh - even though I'm a native English speaker, my very slight Scottish accent means that voice recognition often fails. That doesn't mean I can't speak English!
A better test is conversation with a variety of native speakers, preferably people you don't know.

I once went to Toronto with a friend to visit her parents. They had just moved there from China and spoke no English. They were really excited about a karaoke machine they just bought that would understand your singing and score you from 1 to 100 on accuracy.

It was my birthday, so her mom sang "Happy Birthday" to me on the machine. Mind you, at this point, she knew 2 English words: "happy" and "birthday." She scored a 90.

When it was my turn to sing, I chose something pretty simple, because I wanted to see how high the score could go. I felt pretty confident, since (1) I'm a native English speaker, (2) I majored in opera, and (3) my friend's mom just got a 90. Still, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't break 60.

After many futile tries, the whole Chinese family took the mike and sang "Happy Birthday" one more time. This time, they got a 93.

Stupid computers!

If it's any consolation, I am a native German speaker and the iPhone's recognises better the German of my American friend better than it does mine.