Yesterday evening, I stumbled accross one program which finally allows me to turn the lights on and off in my room by saying "toggle lights". I didn't search for it, and was aware that the possibility exists, but now that is actually works, I'm very pleased with the results

It's extremely cool to say "Toggle Lights, Winamp Stop, Screen Off" when leaving the room to see the lights go off, the music stop, and the screens go standby. So I thought I'd share a short description on how to do it here

What you need:
 - VAC System for voice recognition. 30 days trial, 10 bucks for registration. definitely worth it, I registered my version some hours ago.
 - a good (!) microphone or headset, I use my Speedlink Medusa 5.1
 - AutoHotKey for advanced commands. freeware.
 - Some kind of USB power bar (I use Gembird SIS-PM) or similar for things like light control. This is also easy to do yourself but that requires more know-how than anyone on this forum has

Ok first off, I suppose much depends on the quality of your microphone/headset. With my Medusa, it works at 3 meters distance and more, with winamp running at medium volume... so when it's on my desk it works in the whole room. Good enough.

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To only do simple things like winamp or video player control, just the VAC is enough:

In your winamp or media player of choice, set some global hotkeys if you don't already have (I use ctrl+insert, ctrl+end, ctrl+home for start stop pause respectively, ctrl+pageup/down for next/previous), I recommend you only use one modifier key here as VAC doesn't support more than one (like ctrl+alt). There's a way around that but why not avoid the workaround.

Install VAC, start VACBuilder, do the initial voice training, add command, set Activation Phrase ("Winamp Start"), in Command List set the Command to your hotkey set before (Qualifier Key "Ctrl", Extended Keys "Insert"), repeat for other commands.

You can adjust the recognition in Tools -> Profile Properties. I found that after two or three more voice training sessions, with accuracy/speed tradeoff set to high accuracy, and with Pronunciation Sensitivity set at about 85% it works better than I'd have expected, and it hardly gets distracted by music as long as it isn't too loud.

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Advanced Commands

AutoHotkey is one cool macro program that can be used for tons of things, you can use it to do basically any abstract action on screen that you can do yourself. By binding actions to hotkeys, and calling those from VAC System, you can do commands like "Set Volume Mute/Low/Medium/High", "Screen off", "Open porn folder", "Move Window to Right Screen" or whatever comes to mind.

Ok I'm bored now, might write more howto later.