With all this discussion about "distracted driving", articles like this one by David Coursey in Computer World are coming to the same conclusions as we did. 

"Better speech technology could make texting while driving more than dangerous, it would become obsolete. No longer would it be necessary for a driver to read teensy words from a tiny screen or type using an equally downsized keyboard--these could be replaced by simply talking and listening".

With speech recognition based services there's no need for a keypad, you just use your voice to say what you want to do.  For example, to make a call using Voice Assist you just say "Call" followed by the name of a person in your address book, or to send a text message you say "Text" and the name of the person.  Voice Assist also allows you to use simple speech commands to listen and reply to your email.  So for example, you can say" next" and "previous" to navigate through the list of emails, and "reply" to compose a message back.

Simple speech commands make it really easy to things done.  No keypad required.

Last year, a study conducted by the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany looked at the impact of using speech recognition to make calls while driving.

Compared to manual dialing, the study showed that speech input improved the drivers  ability to maintain the ideal car position by 19 percent.  Using Voice dialing was also 40% faster!

So be safer and more productive with Voice Assist’s voice dialing. Just say “Call” followed by the name of the person in your address book.  If you have more than one phone number for the person, let’s call him John Brown, you can say “Call John Brown at work”.