I did little bit of investigation on the subject. As far as I can gather Vistas "Windows Speech Recognition" will not work in the way you desire in Chrome without a gimmicky or convoluted work around.

My (probably frustrating, I'm sorry!) advice would be to attempt to fix the application you knew it worked with (IE) if at all possible, before investigating other options. Have you tried troubleshooting/ reinstalling IE to see if you can fix the problem?