Playing a prompt with asterisk + doing background task?

Hi,

I have looked through alot of websites and forums to see if I can find a answer to my question but no luck. What I was wanting to find out is if there is a way in either the extensions.conf or a AGI script to play a prompt and while the prompt is playing do something else in the mean time/background.

eg. From what I can see all the prompt playing commands like background etc you need to wait for the prompt to finish or someone to presss a key before the control comes back to asterisk or the AGI script.

I am working on intergrating sphinx2 with Asterisk and I would like to be able to start playing a prompt and start recording voice at the same time using the record command but each command has to wait for the other to finish first so someone could not just start saying the word during the playing of the prompt.

Any help with the above would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Maurice