I know this is a joke, but Jaron Lanier actually proposes machines communicate through human (?) or VR (?) interfaces. Something like that. I spent 15 minutes searching the web and my library but couldn't find it. I read two books of his, it must be in "Dawn of the New Everything" or "You Are Not a Gadget". I'm fuzzy on the idea, but found it interesting enough that I remember it.
I once got a phone's speech-recognition system to recognize another's text-to-speech system, just to see how accurate they'd be.
And I know one game that has a speech-recognition system to post in chat and then other players can use text-to-speech to read the chat aloud. Fun times.
