Siri competitor Sherpa goes after Google Glass

Sherpa, a voice control app that promises a better experience than Apple's Siri, plans to beat Google at its own game on Google Glass.

Sherpa CEO and co-founder Xabier Uribe-Etxebarria unveiled the company's plans for the new app on Thursday in Spain, at the Sherpa Summit, an event with a lineup of speakers such as Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker and John Sculley, former CEO of Apple.

Uribe-Etxebarria said the voice command app is actually more suited for the Google Glass hardware than Google's own software.

"Right now, with Google Glass, it's not taking advantage of all the features and the potential of Google Glass," he told CNET in a phone interview. The commands on Google are limited and restrictive, he said.

"In Google Glass, they have some commands you need to say -- the same words, otherwise it won't work," Uribe-Etxebarria said. "We will bring the glasses into the next stage. With Sherpa you can have a conversation in a much more natural way."

The app, which is currently still in a beta testing phase on smartphones, automates navigation for any scheduled events by tapping into your calendar, plays music without downloading tracks first, and performs hardware actions like turning down the volume or switching on the Wi-Fi for a device.

The Sherpa app for Glass will also predict what you will want to see, similar to Google Now. It learns from your actions, so when it knows you follow a certain sports team, it will bring up the scores for the team's current game. Or, if it's going to rain where you're headed for the day, it'll remind you to bring an umbrella. Uribe-Etxebarria expects the Glass app to launch by the end of the year.

Google Glass competitors want Sherpa on their hardware, according to Uribe-Etxebarria. He said two manufactures that are working on Android-based glasses similar to Google Glass are in talks with Sherpa to use its natural language voice control on their glasses. Uribe-Etxebarria said he couldn't say who they were because he's signed non-disclosure agreements.

We'll see soon enough. The space for hardware like Google Glass continues to heat up, and there has already been rumors of a competitorpreparing to jump into the fray.

Correction, 8:22 a.m. PT: This story initially misspoke about one of the speakers at the Sherpa Summit in Spain. Dell CEO Michael Dell was unable to attend the event.