Speech recognition would be at least very useful for calling to Phonebook entries (safety issue when in car with a handsfree!). I'd love to have this.

I don't know if it will run OK on ARM but a good approach to this could be port KDE's Simon:
http://simon-listens.org/

this would be great, like how some new cars stereos have it which works with phone also

Speech to text.
Ah, a pocketable dictating machine
with readable / printable output.
Great !

BUT:
When will the hardware in a handheld be enough ?
PCs seem to struggle still.
Or, when will someone think of a more efficient way to do it ?

( What happened to neural networks,
they seemed to be good at pattern recognition. )

Calling a phone number by saying a name (via bluetooth hands-free) has worked perfectly nice with S60. That feature would be really good for Maemo!

The Droid doesnt have any problem doing exactly that.

I have gone back to using my Nokia 72 with Vlingo which reads all my messages. This is essential whilst driving so I can hear my texts or emails without taking my eyes off the road. Also has Nokia maps with voice direction which I haven't found on the N900. Too dangerous to use map on screen as safety research has confirmed. Looks as if I may have to lose money and sell the N900 on ebay. Disaster for me. Otherwise it's a great phone, but I can't function efficiently without these road safety features. Shame on Nokia and Maemo for not caring about users' safety.

not exactly true. i just got a HD7 (Win Phone 7) unit and the speech to text recognition (ok, not for dictating but for phone book recognition) is a massive improvement. it now recognizes asian accents and even matches non-english names properly (at least in where i live). so that proves this is quite do-able with mobile hardware.

maybe a simpler approach to this problem for the specific solution of hands-free dialing would be to have an audio clip saved for the common contacts on the phone. that way, you don't have to do speech to text conversion - merely match the recorded clip to what the user says. much easier though less flexible.

for calling multiple numbers, you could have a clip for "Home", "Work", "Home 2", etc. so you could say "Call John Work 2" to get it to dial that number.