Hmm... I force stopped Speaktoit and it works now. So I think you are right!
But that leaves me puzzled why I couldn't get Google Now to work before I first installed Speaktoit, oh well, at least the problem is solved now :-) Thanks!

Hi all. This is my first post. I just bought a Asus Google Nexus 7 3G a couple of days ago, which works well except there's a strange problem with the microphone. I have googled around but does not find anything similar to my problem.

It would *seem* that the speaker does not work: it doesn't work in Skype, I could not record voice, and when I say "Google" on Google Now, nothing happens. If I were to press the microphone icon on the search bar, it immediately pops up message saying "Didn't catch that, try speaking again"... I didn't even get any chance to speak?

Anyway, I would have concluded that the speaker is not working, *except* that it *does* work on my personal assistant app speaktoit, extremely well in fact. Thus it is not a hardware problem.

So that's my strange problem: microphone does not seem to be working *except* on speaktoit, what's going on?