Current research thinks that texting and other phone activities are using different cognitive territory than conversation with a passenger or operating the car controls. That territory may overlap with or interfere with the brain matter used in driving.

I don't believe they've reached definitive conclusions yet and there's a lot of research to do, but one example: Siri is commonly assumed to solve the problem but it probably doesn't.

Will be moot in five years anyway once automated driving takes hold, but cultural change is needed. Texting while driving needs to be looked at by teenagers like drunk driving increasingly is.

for a careless and dangerous behavior that's been normalized. That it's less dangerous than regular texting doesn't make it fine. We should be looking at tech solutions to make it harder to text and drive (as suggested in Bruno's post below), not easier.

If people absolutely need to be able to text while driving, though, I guess it amounts to an improvement. I'd be happy with just minimal enforcement of the phone usage while driving laws on the books. Standing on a street corner and seeing the number of passing drivers looking down or to the side is a jaw dropping experience.

Talk about distracting. And far worse than built-in navigation systems are people using their phones as navigation devices. I know it is necessary (I do it), but it is far more dangerous than in-car voice-to-text capability.

I find the lane departure alert while on ramps and sensor failure warnings for the pre-collision system in heavy rain more distracting than using the voice controls. And since it's a limited set of instructions, and leaves my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road, it is less man machine interface distracting than tuning the old dial or push button radio. The instruction set is more concise than "Honey, can you put a different station on?" Now, there may be some higher "non-human" communications cerebral load involved compared to conversing with a seat mate, and you don't have the second set of "Hey watch out " eyes, but I've found the voice controls (and or the single button presets) to be less distracting than the manual controls for the cockpit of my older cars)
The one automation I've been trying and am about to ditch is the high beams. I think I can do a better job than that thing.