OK, so the N900 lacks voice dialling. It's partly understandable as it developed from a non-phone internet tablet, and on the other hand I find it appalling coming from the world's largest mobile phone maker. So it seems Nokia is handing this over to the user community to develop. My question as a total Maemo newbie is, how likely will that be? I'd like to see a bluetooth ear-piece enabled voice dialling capability.

PS. I created a poll on the subject DS.

I'm not sure how easy this would be for the community to do. Voice dialling, at least on S60, is basically speech recognition that handles both dialling and voice commands. It does so without prior training/recording, and it works for various languages... (a name is just a meaningless set of letters, and its pronounciation varies according to the language you speak)

I'm not aware of any free software that could perform this so easily. (If there is any - i would love to have it to voice-control my desktop ...)

Even if there is a solution the community could build upon, i'm not sure if it's the most efficient way of getting the task done... knowing that the Finns already have the code and the know-how etc., only trapped in a different OS-world.

It might be easier to do text2speech, like having the N900 read the name of the caller when it rings. I know this is the very first thing that'll annoy me when I receive my N900 and try to use it as a phone: That there's no way to tell if I should take it out of the pocket to accept the call without getting it out of the pocket to look at who's calling.

Granted, as you say they already have it in a different OS. So how do we get Nokia to make this happen? Do they listen? Send e-mails? A large thread here?

Nokia has repeatedly pointed out that what happens in this community, while interesting, will not replace usual ways of market research. We can do whatever we want... If Nokia has data telling them that only 0,74% of the target group would want voice dialling, they'll probably not implement it.
If their data indicate that voice dialling is an important feature, they may already be working on it.

FWIW, I would like to see voice dialing implemented as I have used it in the past, but the voice dialing for my N95 is 100% useless. It has a near 0% recognition rate so I have not used voice dialing since my last phone.

So, if Nokia is listening then yes its a feature people (at least I) will want but only if it is implemented correctly.

Seriously.. Who uses that option?

If they have data indicating that the intarnets will be as hung up on the N900's lack of voice dialling as they were on MMS on the Iphone? I do believe whatever the first/biggest bloggers/testers will put a focus on, can be a marketing issue.

I do not believe that there will be any much focus on voice dialling though. It's too easy to make revenge jokes about MMS.

I certainly do, daily. When using any form of handsfree (whether that's walking down the street with a headset or driving in a car with a carkit) it is by far the easiest, and in a car the only legal, way of dialing.

It's much faster than scrolling through contacts. Speed-dial for a few preferred contacts that I call very often, for everything else I use voice dial - except I'm in public, I hate doing this in puclic. It just looks too stupid.

Any drivers in the UK