Intelligent Voice took it upon itself to survey over 2,000 Americans on the infamous Siri, and the results are in: 46 percent feel the service is “oversold.”

Apparently Americans feel Apple (News - Alert) marketed Siri far beyond what it is capable of. Forty-four percent of those surveyed said Siri’s accuracy is “hit or miss,” or worse. Only 12.7 percent said Siri is “extremely accurate.”

“Voice Recognition is an emerging technology that’s been emerging for 30 years,” said Intelligent Voice CTO Nigel Cannings, in a statement. “We need to be careful that we sell what is possible, and it seems we’re not doing that. ‘Star Trek’ communication with computers is still a long way off.”

So, what is voice recognition actually capable of and how should companies market these services?

Speech recognition technology made major strides in the 1970s, thanks to interest and funding from the U.S. Department of Defense. The DoD's DARPA Speech Understanding Research (SUR) program, from 1971 to 1976, was one of the largest of its kind in the history of speech recognition.

Since then, we’ve seen voice recognition come a long way, but we’re still not at the level of perfection that Sci-Fi movies make it out to be.

In 1990, Dragon launched the first consumer speech recognition product, Dragon Dictate, at a hefty price tag (News - Alert) of $9,000. Seven years later, the much-improved Dragon NaturallySpeaking arrived.

Technological advances have made speech recognition software and devices more functional and user friendly, with most contemporary products performing tasks with over 90 percent accuracy.

With the advent of Siri, those surveyed are simply underwhelmed.

“With the release of iOS 7, Apple has dropped the ‘Beta’ tag for Siri, but the need for an internet connection as well as issues with transcription do leave open to question whether that was a wise idea,” said Cannings.

After the launch of iOS 7, Apple updated its Siri webpages to drop all references to the product being in beta. Since then, Apple has worked to refine the voice-enabled personal assistant to make it faster, more accurate and more consistent.