Executive summary: Maemo has no text-to-voice or built-in voice command ("handsfree") functionality.
Most advanced phones and all consumer computer operating systems have some form of voice recognition capability for the seeing-impaired and for cases where the graphical user interface (GUI) can't be used (e.g. when driving). There are also many cases where text-to-speech (computer speech) is available.
Maemo has few or none of these features.
A complete solution to this problem would be a core AUI that provides an API that all apps can use to support some version of spoken user interface and uses context to maintain the language model at a manageable size. This is complicated by the lack of acoustic or language models for all the languages Maemo supports, the huge amount of work that it would take to add it to all the core apps, and the complexities of spoken language itself. Due to these factors, this is unlikely to ever be implemented by Nokia as a core feature.
Let's find a less extreme but still useful solution that can reasonably be implemented.
