Asterisk PBX and voice?

Anyone using an asterisk setup with voice recog for IVR menus?

I'm toying with the idea of using an IVR (interactive voice response) setup to handle kids phone calls.  Several kids in the neighborhood have similar cell phone watches (LG Gizmo Gadgets on Verizon).  These are basically LTE dumb phones built into a watch.  They're limited to 10 phone numbers, which makes for some hassles trying to let them call each other.  With mom, dad, the grandparents, etc, there's not a lot left for friends.  They're speakerphones and have no dial pad features.  It's basically, select a number and call it, or accept a call from among the 10 on the list.  That's it.
 
I'm noodling with the idea of setting up an asterisk PBX with voice recog for prompts.  Kid can call the PBX and then use voice prompts to call another kid on the list.  With a limit set of duration of calls so they don't run into problems.  No doubt there's a ton of ways to screw this up or abuse it, but I'd like to give it a shot.  I'd be using a SIP provider to handle multiple simultaneous calls (I've not yet looked into this).  
 
Anyone played around with asterisk and IVR?

I am using a simple ivr in asterisk to screen phone calls.

Not using voice recognition though, it sounds cool.

As a fallback you could just have them press 1 for one person, 2 for another, etc

As I mentioned in my post, there's no dial pad on their watch phones.  Voice recog would be the only way to do it.  Audio is the only channel they have in when using that sort of phone.

I've still not gotten around to setting this up.  I got waylaid setting up a new pfsense router and a pi-hole DNS server.  Which, in turn, lead to discovering some shenanigans from my Netgear R7000 router, leading to a whole bunch of time setting up a 3rd party firmware on it.

this is a cool goal - good luck and drop a progress note now and again.
 
( I've been running pi-hole for about a year at a remote location, mostly to manage bandwidth for the sat link. it's quite effective. what shenanigans did you find, and did you go tomato? )

Curious about your PFSense and Pi-Hole DNS server stuff?
 
PFSense by default turns on DNS Resolver and optionally you can utilize the built in DNS Forwarder.
 
Adding Maxmind's PFSense PF Geo Blocker you should be fine.  (and Snort and Squid)

I have played with Asterisk a bit (changed over to FreeSwitch a few years ago), but have no idea how you'd do voice recognition for dialing. 
 
I hadn't encountered the Pi-hole before... that's a nifty use for a Pi.  I use the Untangle firewall to block ads, but the Pi is a nice, low-powered solution to the same problem... might have to look into that for another project I'm working on.