Sounds just like voice recognition is just having some issues recognizing certain words. If you are using the regular Google voice recognition, enabling audio history in the settings will allow Google to improve recognition for you. If you care, this does mean recordings will be sent to Google.
IIRC the default texting client Blu has on there should be the old android messaging app, which hasn't received a significant update since gingerbread. You might want to give another texting client a try. I use Hangouts, which is nice because it merges texts and hangouts messages in to one conversation, but there are plenty of good texting clients.
If you're on android 4.4, you can change your default texting app by going to settings>more>default SMS app. If you're on 4.3 or earlier, you just disable notifications for all apps but the one you want to use.
As far as your data issues, It's possible there was some network congestion or throttling going on, but it doesn't make sense that it was only happening while you were holding it. Maybe you had a weak signal to begin with and picking up the phone affected the signal just enough to kill your data. I don't know anything about that kind of stuff, so I'm just pulling this out of my ass.