This sounds so exciting!
I thought Verizon supported something like this already, “Spk n’TXT”, which I assumed was a way to do Voice Recognition with transliteration to an SMS text message.
But if I go to Verizon’s webpage for sending text messages to a phone from a web browser, the “Spk n’TXT” functionality actually translates entered text… To TXT MSG SPK. This is not an April Fool’s thing either, I discovered this two days ago.
For example, if I enter a message that reads “Are you doing anything for lunch today?” and click on the Spk n’TXT link, it converts that text to “R U doN NETING 4 lunch 2DAY?”
Evidently this is so we dinosaurs who still write and read in English can Get With It and not embarrass ourselves when texting.
I really wish I was joking but I’m not.
Wow! Amazing technology, isn’t it? Finally we’ll be able to just talk instead. This has been a long time coming. 
My old Verizon phone did what you think “Spk n’TXT” did. It was painfully slow, though, so maybe this New and Improved version lets you talk at normal speed.
I’m not a dinosaur, but I’m dumbfounded. I didn’t realize this texting style had status attached to it such that anyone would want to fake their way through it.
I don’t use punctuation in my own texts, but other than that they’re generally transcriptions of perfectly normal spoken English into standardly spelled written English. I can’t read the abbreviated style of text message without hearing the “speaker” of the text as being somewhat mentally handicapped. My problem, not theirs.
Also, @OP: Cute. 
What’s that whooshing noise?
Shh, don’t spoil it!
I just want the keypad improved. All this pushing is killing my finger tips. If there was some way to spin the letters and numbers, that’d be progress.
I had an idea for a method where you just click something a couple of times and then speak the name/number of who you wanted to be connected with. Then someone in the system would connect you.
Yah, I know the OP was a Fool (I swear! ;)), but it reminded me of the Spk n’TXT thing I discovered earlier this week that I found so dumbfounding.
Maybe I should start a new thread on what that implies. As Frylock notes, it suggests that it’s become a standard enough convention that there are enough people who want or need to “fake it”. Which chills me to the… well, maybe not to the marrow, but definitely something subcutaneous.
I want some kind of personal transport so I can go to the other person and talk face to face.
That would cost an arm and a leg! Well, more than just one leg, anyway.
And if they could tether the phone to a base with some sort of cord, so you didn’t lose it, that would be great, too. Oh, and this might be crazy but stay with me here – how about phones that could be used by any member of the public, so we didn’t all have to carry our own? People could pay per call, and maybe the phone company could put the phones in some kind of stationary shelter, like a booth.
You can get something kind of like that on the iPhone, but it doesn’t seem to handle letters. Or am I misinterpreting? Are we speaking about bidirectional voice-to-text here?
[ insert witty, well-written treatise on the advantages of a pony-express system here ]
Alas…progress!
This sounds like a great deal of time-wasting and skills-duplication. I think what we need to do is have one person do the communicating for us - say, someone whose job it is to just send and receive messages all day long. I’d imagine that person would need to become fairly proficient at this, so reducing communication down to some sort of code (probably binary in nature) would be best. Then we could just tell that person what our message was, he’d send it, and we’d be done with it.
Okay, improbably enough, I actually did get someone with this one. My wife copied it and e-mailed it to some of her friends and one bit! Reply reproduced below with name redacted to protect the gullible:
To be fair, she whipped this reply back really quickly and probably didn’t think about it very hard.
“I can talk a lot faster than I text…”
You got me for a few seconds. I don’t find it that far-fetched that someone would devlop something like this. Well done, though.
Score a point, Diogenes. Look at this:
Is voice becoming the new text (again)?
Last year’s April Fools joke is this year’s news, apparently.