I have been working on the speech recognition system of Ultra Hal Assistant 6.2. I have updated the speech libraries it uses and finally have the "mute mic when Hal is speaking" feature working no matter what graphics engine is being used. This goes a long way to improving the speech recognition experience with Hal no matter what microphone you use. Also new to Hal 6.2 will be command vocabularies. With Hal minimized you can say "Wake up Hal" at any time to bring Hal up, "Microphone On" and "Microphone Off" to control when Hal listens, "Clear line" if you want to respeak a phrase you see Hal incorrectly recognized, and "End conversation" to hide Hal.
Zabaware will also become a reseller of Voice Tracker microphones from
http://www.acousticmagic.com/ with the release of Hal 6.2. This is actually a desktop microphone that's quality is like a headset microphone. It is a microphone array and can zero in on whoever is speaking and filter out all background noise. I recently set one up in my living room and programmed Hal to control my home theater system in addition to its normal chat functions, it works really well.