-1- The speech recognition is *G-REAT* , and margins & thresholds are wide enough to deliver good speech recognition even under bad
circumstances ( loud empeg volume & other noise )

-2- The speech recognition is crappy and only delivers good results in your living room, with volume set to <-20 db ... ( maybe not that bad, but
you get the basic idea :-)

I think you're close on both counts. The company I work for (we design IVR's for telephone systems) does a LOT of voice reco and we've had good experiences even in noisy environments, i.e. mobile phones, etc. Most good VR packages can "tune out" the frequencies that do not contain speech, significantly narrowing the band which it needs to filter voice from. Assuming the software Empeg will be using is of good, commercial quality, it shouldn't be thrown off(too far) by high-or-low frequency road noise, and will only pay attention to freq's in the speech range. This is aided by the Microphone array (with built-in DSP, also for filtering) which may or may not be necessary, depending on just how much noise you're dealing with. Chances are, you'll get much better "natural speaking tone" VR with the better mike, but alternatively, you could just speak "Loud&Clear" into a cheap condenser, or even better, unidirectional mike pointed right at your face and do all right.
The problem is, we just can't know until it's released!
Jason

_~= Dearing =~_
"WAY too happy about having #99."