Linux from scratch is completely compiled from source and isn't really a distribution. It could be made into one, but what results is really quite large in disk space used and it's tedious to maintain. It is definitely interesting and a great experience to build the entire mess from source, but I think it would make more sense to use another distro's baseline to build a new distro. Otherwise, too much time is spent on really basic things before you even get to anything specific to speech or command line tools. I made a linux from scratch distro a couple of years ago that I was putting on several machines but it is too much work to maintain. It will certainly give you much appreciation for the work that goes into slackware, debian, gentoo, ubuntu, etc. There are a few live CD images of linux from scratch around though that may be interesting as a baseline for a speech enabled bootable image. -- Doug
