Android developer Dexetra has created an Android-based rival to the much-hailed iPhone 4S assistant Siri, and its name is Iris.
According to Dexetra, Iris was created in just eight hours, and became available for free download from the Android market last week.
“It started out as a lazy Friday with half our team missing; the influx of tweets and posts on the 'Awesome Siri' were flying everywhere. Suddenly, I got the urge to do something similar for Android,” says a Dexetra blog post.
“Somehow I managed to write a tiny engine that could answer your questions, digging the results from the Web.”
Dexetra says once it started seeing results, the team added voice input, text-to-speech and heuristic humour into Iris.
“We decided on the name 'Iris', which would be Siri in reverse. And we also reverse engineered a crazy expansion - Intelligent Rival Imitator of Siri,” says Dexetra.
“We were still in the fun mode, but when we started using it, the results were actually good, really good.”
Work in progress
Initial reviews have been positive, but the app seems to be a little rough around the edges, as users complained of slow response times and Iris' inability to do currency conversions and other calculation.
Some updates include the addition of a conversation feature (with sarcastic answers from Iris), image search results and an enhanced knowledge base. The updated version is also faster, and Dexetra promises users a response in less than eight seconds.
In order to run on a phone, Iris requires the Voice Search app and Text to Speech (TTS) Library to be installed.
Not the first
While some have criticised Dexetra for copying Apple's Siri, natural language chat-bots are actually nothing new. A longstanding example is the AI Foundation's Alice. According to the AI Foundation, many people have asked whether it was involved in the development of Siri: “The simple answer is no, unless Apple is perhaps using some version of the free open source Alice AIML software.”
The foundation also notes there is a comparable Android app developed by Pannous, called Voice Actions, which is available for both Android and iOS and is also known as Jeannie.
“Besides making it possible to control your phone through speech commands, the Voice Actions app also allows you to have a conversation with an AIML bot based on Alice,” says the foundation.
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