Hi Ed,

> something like this professional microphone? [...]

>but will the added "quality" be worth the added expense in terms of

>VoxForge accuracy?

The general rule is that speech recognition works best with acoustic models trained with audio from the target application.

Since we are targeting command and control applications on the desktop, we actually need speech from many different microphones, so buying a professional quality mic for speech submission is not necessary. 

If your current mic setup produces too much line noise, you would likely be better off with a decent (and much cheaper) USB microphone - these seem to give better quality recordings since the audio processing is outside the PC. 

However (there's always a catch...), the Java speech submission applet has no way to change its audio input from the default, and has trouble recognizing USB mics right now...

Regardless, you can still record prompts using Audacity.

thanks,

Ken