Speakable Items not working in Mavericks

Question

The Speakable Items in Mavericks only work about 1 in a 100 commands
Calibrations is working for about 50%
What I don't understand is that my iPhone 5 does a fantastic job with voice commands and my iMac has so far only responded to "what is the time" after saying the command a dozen times.
It looks like the Apple Support Community is not monitored by Apple because I have not seen any answers from Apple.
Has anyone found a way of making it work?

Answer 1

(my post above, user name: siouxsan, was made on a friend's account)
I tried the suggestion above (rtw5), but unfortunately it didn't solve the problem.
To clarify, I can click on the little pop down menu, on the bottom of the round microphone, and select "open speech comands window" and the speech commands window will appear. I can also hold down the selected key and speak a command, ie., "what time is is?" and the little volume lines on the mircophone will register my voice. The problem is, the computer does not respond to any of the commands.
an interesting note: if I go to:
*System Preferences*, then
Speech, then
*Spoken User Interface*, then click on
*Demonstate Settings*
Then, a window pops up that says, "This message demonstrates your settings for talking alerts."
(When the computer was working correctly and responding to speakable commands, if I clicked on
*Demonstrate Settings,* instead of getting that message window, the computer would "speak", actually demonstating the settings.
Currently, the only time the computer speaks now is to announce the time every half hour.