Hi Etrust,
Yes, you've understood correctly. James's command does not use the Python plugin. You just need to insert your own API key in his XML.
I think the forum has several Wolfram Alpha solutions posted in various threads, so it's confusing. But all of them probably work reasonably well, and most of them are similar.
In this post there's a link to a video where you can see one of the versions working:
http://voxcommando.com/forum/index.php?topic=1463.msg12773#msg12773The main limitation is that we have to use a payload dictation if we want to be able to ask any question. For this reason, I find it works better to have the following settings in my Options: 1. "Show OSD Alternates" selected, and 2. "Don't execute if #Alternates >=2". This way, VoxCommando will not automatically try to use the "most likely" result that it hears, and will instead show me a list of possibilities to choose from, as demonstrated in the video.