There are a few open-source projects, like at http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/ -- as you say, they haven't gotten the love that Google's or Dragon's have, not last I looked.

You could probably mash something up using Voxeo or even the new Twilio client stuff.

I have this on my project list for some home automation ideas, but it is too far down to actually have been given any cycles.

If you use Windows, there's built-in Speech recognition.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms723627(v=vs.85).as...

There's a server version of it with Microsoft Lync I think.

Microsoft also has a cloud service for the same:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Tellme/technology/default.asp...

when you develop on WP7 you get it for free http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/hawa... along with OCR and other goodies. Well, for research purposes at least

Just one more option - Twilio has a voicemail transcription feature as part of it's API, with automatic call back. So anything recorded could be available as text that way.