[kragen]

i had a sprint samsung sch-6100 flip phone with a similar voice recognition feature at the end of last millennium, but it would only match the name you told it to call against names you'd previously made training voice recordings of. that is, it wasn't trying to do speech-to-text or text-to-speech; it was just trying to discriminate among the particular recordings you had made previously

i didn't use the feature very much because to activate it, iirc, you had to either flip the phone open or press a button on a hands-free headset. but obviously this wasn't a bluetooth headset, and the phone couldn't play music, so you wouldn't walk around with it in your ears all the time; unless you'd just gotten off a different call, you'd have to get it out, put it in your ears, plug it in, and then you could use the speech recognition feature

so unless you were a secretary or something, making one phone call after another for hours (to a small number of people), you might as well just use speed dial