Noterary begain with Shazam app on iPhone?

MusicDNS -- software dev kit. (designed for whole songs)

Gracenote: MusicID (commercial?) 

See Picard program.

Turns audio into a unique id... that way you can for example, know what song you're listening to.

Could this be used for word recognition?   

http://sourceforge.net/projects/speech2text/

http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/html/cmusphinx.php

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/19/1446213

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/moskowitz_02september23.mspx