Wish I could help you on the voice recognition thing. I did do it with Dragon NaturallySpeaking a few years ago. It was fairly simple, reading some sentences and paragraphs supplied by Dragon into the headset microphone. Apparently the wording chosen use a broad range of words, syllables and consonants to achieve the best results.
Go to this link for a tutorial on how to do it in Windows 7:
http://www.windowsobserver.com/2009/...-in-windows-7/
Windows 8 projected release date is roughly 4th quarter of 2012. That's the best guesstimate from industry insiders. 2012 - 4th quarter... Hmmmm?
M$ is trying to maintain a 3 year OS release schedule, like they were keeping prior to the Vista debacle.