Does anyone know whose engine they use? There are only a couple of Speaker Independent Speech Recognition Engines out there. Have they developed their own or licensed it from someone?
As Voice matures and more people use it Google will continually get a larger dataset to draw information from. Perhaps it could feed into a better probabilistic transcription approach in the veins of Google Translate.
The technology being used to power my G1's "Search by Voice" feature is really surprisingly good. I would assume it's the same stuff. Maybe it was just the unusual names that threw it.