If there’s one thing that gets under the skin of Android fans more than anything, it’s Apple receiving glowing praise for something Android already does, or could easily do if anybody just put their mind to it. Not to be out-shined by the Siri voice recognition assistant, a major selling point of the new iPhone 4S, one Android developer team took it upon themselves to create an Android alternative, and did so in a mere eight hours, just to drive the point home.
The result is Iris (“Siri” backwards), created by Android dev team Dexetra, which says it was inspired by “the influx of tweets and posts on the ‘Awesome Siri’” that began flying around the web by the truckload.
“Suddenly, I got the urge to do something similar for Android,” writes Dexetra on its blog. “Since we have been working on NLP and Machine learning for over an year now, I had a crazy belief that I could pull this off. Somehow I managed to write a tiny engine that could answer your questions, digging the results from the web.”
After only eight hours, Dexetra had “created a decent layout and design,” and added voice input, text-to-speech and “a lot of heuristic humor.”
Following a wave of positive feedback, Dexetra submitted Iris to the Android Market, where it is now available for download.
Users should be aware that Iris is still very much in alpha, and requires “Voice Search” and “TTS Library” to be installed on the handset for Iris to work properly. And even then, it’s still a bit quirky; as expected for an app developed in so little time, Iris doesn’t work nearly as well as Siri, which has draw praise across the board for its surprisingly solid functionality. Still, if Iris – or something like it – can get up to par with iPhone 4S-exclusive Siri, it would remove one of the primary reasons to purchase the new Apple handset, which is faster than the iPhone 4, and has an impressive 8-megapixel camera, but is already being outdone by a number of Android devices with better specs.
Download Iris from the Android Market here, and let us know what you think in the comments.
Via SlashGear
yea iPhone leads the sheeps
Somehow it seems odd that a team would be proud to have copied something someone else did. Copying is the easy part, it’s coming up with the original concept and making it easy to use that’s the hard part.
Android already had a number of voice options — BEFORE Siri.
I’ve been using voice control to do all sorts of things on my Android since I got it. Of course, it simply did what I asked, rather than talking back.
But apparently it wasn’t all that difficult to implement that, now, was it?
Erm…Apple didn’t creat Siri anyways…they bought the original app from the app store, and jazzed it up…and repackaged it as an Apple created project (which its not)..
Actually, what seems odd is that Apple fans can’t remember that Siri was in the app store and that Apple bought them up, so it’s not like this is actually an Apple innovation anyway. And this idea isn’t new, Dave talked to Hal in 2001, and Eliza diagnosed my mental state in the late 70s on the TRS-80, so this is more of a evolution than a revolution.
Sio siri, Android ni copycats..
God forsake that iOS fan boys would admit that some other company has better products than their precius apple. But I gotta admit that they have the best marketing among in the worl od mobile phones. Just look the commercial for the sirri or some other apple products. It is all marketing. They all praise 8mpx camera on 4s but nokia had 12mpx camera with xenon flash on their N8 almoust year and a half ago….
This is just one of many examples of good marketing. So i would rather use Android than the apple which you must jailberak to use proplerly.
This isn’t surprising. Apple never develops anything new. And it is just hilarious that the devs made Iris so quickly. And no one took the concept of iOS from Apple, and even if they did, it was largely a copy of things that already existed. The market does lie. Marketing and advertising trump quality of product every time, because people are stupid. There are even people so stupid they say things like “could of” when it is “could have.”
Kinda funny how android users categorize all things apple as stolen or catching up when in fact they stole the ENTIRE concept of iOS and used it in their products and then cry about each new refined addition to apple products that resemble their inferior, infant stage software and say they “could of” or “would of” done it better. The market doesn’t lie, Apple > Android in EVERY aspect :)
Apple did not make Siri, it came through an acquisition, google it or read
abhi-agrawal.blogspot.com/2011/10/siri-how-sweet-you-are.html
Android HAS had similar options for over a year! Try Vlingo, Voice Actions, and EVA. I’ve tried the first two and use them regularly. They work well and you can also add new voices to the TTS that make them sound a LOT less robotic. Try SVOX Classic TTS and you can add all kinds of different voices that sound very realistic. Look Apple takes things that are already out there and polishes them. My family has owned iPhones for the first 2 generations. Android works better for us because it’s not closed. If I want a new keyboard I can have it. If I want to change the lockscreen I can. etc, etc. Apple makes nice stuff…they just don’t let me do with it what I want to do with it after I PAID for it.
I find it humorous how all the ignorant apple fans are down on Android for copying their beloved siri, after all apple has copied from Android. And to think it took apple 16 months to release this new feature, when Android wrote it in less than a hour. The Iphail is on its way out just as rim went.
siri from iOS and tellme from MS are native feature which can do everything beyond any OS restriction than andriod copying app
SIRI is not even an original idea from Apple, it is from an acquired software from another company. So it is Apple building on technology from another company. Like everything else, technology is building on top on each other’s idea/concept. What really Apple is good at is integration.
What’s REALLY got to smart is that Apple payed an amount estimated to be $200 MILLION* or more for Siri — and a couple of guys cobble together a work-alike from mostly already existing voice features on Android in a paltry 8 HOURS of dev time?!?
Ouch.
* http://scobleizer.com/2010/04/28/breaking-news-siri-bought-by-apple/
But they can file a lawsuit anyway :)
Second place is still first loser. iPhone leads…everyone else follows…
I’ve tried and it’s a better personal assistant cuz it flirts back and even accepted my offer to grab a beer later.
“The reality is there is no major technological distinction between the two platforms, the difference is in marketing and quality control”
The reality is that your reality is a delusion. 1.) You obviously didn’t read the article clearly. 2.) You probably haven’t looked at the distinctions btwn Apple and Android clearly. 3.) I could spell them out clearly here and you prob wouldn’t read or understand that clearly. Clear?
Which one ? Best buy ? Ipad2 or SumS tab 10.1???
Its time to tab and time to close apple ..
That’s how the world keeps moving forward! Keep the good, throw away the bad…=)
Tried the app by asking it about 10 general questions (where is good chinese food, what time is it, etc) and it got none of them close. It’ll need at least another 8 hours of work.
Anyone tried it yet? I find it amusing that android fans are irked by apple stealing their thunder. If it can be done and android and there is demand for it then shut up and just do it. The reality is there is no major technological distinction between the two platforms, the difference is in marketing and quality control.
Actually, there are a NUMBER of technological distinctions between the two platforms, although I’m not sure I would want to try to suggest which is ‘best’ from a general perspective.
Anyhow, yeah, Iris works well for some stuff and is more than a little hinky on other stuff. But that’s certainly what one would expect from an alpha version.
Apple copied androids notification window.
Really think the copy cats are pathetic …
Apple invented electricity
Sio siri, Android ni copycats..