DragonDictate at that time only considered two words. Dragon NaturallySpeaking, sometimes very visibly, considers all the words in its buffer before it decides what it will commit to the document. Speech recognition is certainly a moving target. What was true about speech recognition two years ago, in some ways, hardly applies. The price has dropped dramatically.
Training is still advisable for top performance.
In practice, the majority of cost is in hardware, training, and then software. Seven years ago you could get a computer and speech recognition software for 15 thousand dollars. Demonstration of ten lines of training. Demonstration of vocabulary builder. Demonstration of correction and editing, mouse control, and computer control.