> that was cool for about 20 minutes on my pentium 1 acer computer. Hasn’t been since.

Oh back in the days, i.e. 20 years ago, I had a better voice control system than anything afforded by Alexa or Apple or others, using MS Speech API in its custom constrained grammar mode, plus some bootleg samples of Star Trek's computer voice + a sub-dollar microphone soldered to a long cable and hung on the side of the wardrobe.

The trick that made it work? Microsoft Speech API actually let you train voice to your own text corpus. I'd prepare all combinations of commands I want to issue, print it out, and train it over a dozen short sessions in several locations of the room and at different ambient noise levels (from silent through various genres of music playing at various loudness). End result was more reliable and had better voice-mismatch rejection than any current system I've tried.

Oh, and the real kicker? This all worked fully locally; this was before cloud was even a thing. Turns out you don't actually need cloud for reliable voice control. Nor that much processing power; PC I had then was relatively budget even for 2006.