Speech recognition would be hardly a feat of computing, even cars have it now as you see on ads on tv
The real marvel of this adventure, as listed in the article, is:
Perhaps the most useful software, however, is a natural language processing program called DeepQA that IBM claims can understand a human sentence. This program is what differs Watson from a typical search engine, which can just return a list of results to a set of keywords.
This is where the technological leap has been made, and I believe it is a natural step forward towards AI.