A recent study at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, looked at the effects of texting on 11 -14 year olds.

"The kids who used their phones a lot were faster on some of the tests, but were less accurate. We suspect that using mobile phones a lot, particularly tools like predictive texts for SMS, is training them to be fast but inaccurate. Their brains are still developing so if there are effects then potentially it could have effects down the line, especially given that the exposure is now almost universal. The use of mobile phones is changing the way children learn and pushing them to become more impulsive in the way they behave."

So if these kids moved to voice texting rather than using predictive texting would this make them less impulsive?  They certainly would be more articulate. 

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.

Initial results from the July-December 2008 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) indicate that the number of American homes with only wireless telephones continues to grow. More than one of every five American homes (20.2%) had only mobile phones during the second half of 2008, an increase of 2.7 percentage points since the first half of 2008.

In addition, one of every seven American homes (14.5%) received all or almost all calls on wireless telephones, despite having a landline telephone in the home.