Apple's Siri gets stiff competition

Siri, the speech recognition-based personal app baked into Apple's iPhone 4S, faces a product from Sensory Inc. that not only recognizes voice commands, but does so despite noisy environments. Trulyhandsfree Voice Control 2.0 by Sensory is also "always on," not requiring any buttons to be pushed to activate it, PC World reported. "It's amazing... They've used some kind of black magic so you can have your phone in your pocket in a noisy environment and issue voice commands," it quoted Michael Morgan, a mobile devices analyst with ABI Research in New York City, as saying. Sensory's app is available for smartphones running Google's Android operating system, PC World said. California-based Sensory's speech recognition technology has been used in products produced by Plantronics, Motorola, Hasbro, Mattel, Kensington, and Samsung, PC World said. PC World also noted Sensory's app appears to be able to determine if a user is speaking to it or talking to someone else. "You can leave it on and talk for two hours, and it will not misfire, and it will pick up the second you say a command. It does an excellent job," Morgan said. Morgan said that while Apple "did a great job of making sure that the speech recognition is contextually aware," at this point "it's going to be speech recognition making promises that it can't deliver on at the moment." — TJD, GMA News