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Despite the highly praised Nexus One built-in noise cancellation, I need to use speech recognition in an extremely noisy environment with better noise isolation/cancellation. Is there a so called "speech recognition microphone" that would help? I'm not aware of the complexity or performance of the noise isolation algorithm used by the N1, is it as good as I'm going to get?

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Questions asking for opinions are generally not a good fit for this site. You've already chosen a solution to your problem; you're just asking for validation. Please read the FAQ. – Al Everett Sep 13 '11 at 15:40
I've rewritten to be more of a "How can I solve this problem?" – Matthew Read♦ Sep 13 '11 at 16:43

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If you are working in a high noise environment, a traditional mic isn't going to help you. Even with a noise cancelling secondary mic it will be very difficult for the equipment to pick your voice out of the noise and isolate it. You might look into a throat mic instead, which grabs your voice by direct contact with you rather than conduction through the air. These are especially suited for noisy environments.

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Throat mic is probably the best bet, I'd agree. The N1's noise cancellation doesn't work well in environment with particularly high wind noise or droning machinery, I've found. – DavidAP Sep 13 '11 at 18:12
@JadeMason +1 already for introducing the existence of a "throat mic" to me. I will definitely check that out but the fundamental question remains: Will it work in tandem with Nexus One's built-in noise cancellation existing hardware+software implementation? have you tried it? Does it work? Does it work better? Thanks. – Android Eve Sep 13 '11 at 20:21
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The way noise cancellation works is that one mic is picking up the ambient noise while the other mic picks up identical ambient noise as well as your voice. The processor then inverts the phase of the ambient only feed and combines that with the ambient + voice feed to cancel out the ambient noise. This process relies on two very similar microphones picking up sound in a very similar way. The throat mic will be picking up sound in a very different way from the ambient mic on your Nexus One, so the phone's feature is likely unnecessary and useless with a throat mic. – JadeMason Sep 14 '11 at 12:26

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