The text-to-speech is actually a little nicer than Siri or Cortana, but not groundbreaking. This was the only one of the 5 that I thought did well. The rest might have been better without demo pages.
Smartphone microphones are much better than laptop microphones and pretty much on par with using headsets on a laptop - they represent our primary use case.
Well, I don't think the technology is that bad :-). But I agree with you. We have to solve the problem of poorer quality audio input, and the sooner the better! But there are also many scenarios where good audio input is feasible and would like feedback on those sorts of application ideas too.
For visual recognition, I used a picture of a snowmobile from http://www.1888goodwin.com/2013/11/14/what-do-you-need-to-do..., which it identified with 73% confidence as "Invertebrate".
Speech to text is a parody twitter account waiting to happen. Here's me asking it how it does with technical transcription:
How do you doing technical words.
If you were going to have to talk about get an jute cushion pull.
And you wanted to discuss the impact on a file server memory.
Issues that cross processes talk about home forks rivers slowed difficult.