Does RecognitionListener.onError() automatically SpeechRecognizer.cancel()?

you can destroy current session by destroy(). And you can restart it again

Actually Femi, some of the error conditions DO stop the transcription service from listening (SpeechRecognizer.ERROR_SPEECH_TIMEOUT for example). It is not necessary to call destroy, just startlistening again.

No, cancel is not called when onError is invoked. You can look at the source here.