Apple Speech Recognition crashing?

[Mark T. Tomczak]

Greetings all!

I've been a fan of Apple's built-in Speakable Items technology for 
awhile, but left it turned off for a time because I use a laptop and 
kept picking up bad commands from background chatter. I recently 
re-enabled it to discover that it no longer seems to work properly on 
my G3 iBook (800MHz). After about thirty seconds, the speech feedback 
window will start to show a constant "receiving command" symbol (the 
lines flowing toward the microphone), and the audio level bar will lock 
at a midpoint position. At this point, the program is completely 
non-responsive to the System Preferences interface, and if I hit the 
"Toggle Listening" button, the program crashes after about thirty 
seconds.

Note that this is what happens when I leave the program in "Listen for 
name to be spoken" mode. If I turn on "listen while key is pressed," 
the problem gets slightly better, but after about 10 minutes the same 
thing happens.

Has anyone experienced similar behavior? What might I be able to do to 
isolate the problem and fix it?

Thanks,
Mark