Windows installed some updates a couple of days ago and speech recognition wouldn't work again. I uninstalled some of the updates and now it's working. To keep that from happening again, I turned off the automatic update installation. Hopefully that will solve the problem.

It looks to me like my computer has two versions of Internet Explorer, 32 bit and 64 bit. It looks like it updated to the 64 bit program when speech recognition wouldn't work. I think speech recognition only works with the 32 bit version.