iPhone’s Siri Got You Green With Envy? Try Out Iris for Android [Download]
One of the biggest selling points of the iPhone 4S is definitely its voice recognition feature, Siri. I’ll admit — although I would likely never use it — it’s pretty neat. It’s so good in fact that I’ve even heard around the Twittersphere it’s managed to sway a few longtime Android devotees on over to the “darkside.” If you were one of those Android users seduced by Siri’s charms, you may want to listen up. Apparently, a few developers from Dexetra.com managed to get a Siri-alike app up an running on Android in only 8 hours during a hackathon.
Like Siri, Iris works by asking simple, serious or fun questions (pictured above) and the app will scour the internets for the answer and respond accordingly. While it started out as a fun project, things got more serious when the team found out the had a real gem on their hands. Lead developer Narayan Babu had this to say,
When we started seeing results, everyone got excited and started a high speed coding race. In no time, we added Voice input, Text-to-speech, also a lot of hueristic humor into Iris. Not until late evening 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. We were still in the fun mode, but when we started using it the results were actually good, really good.
Iris will soon be available on the Android Market but if you have a lot of unanswered questions floating around your head that need immediate answers, you can download the early beta of the app here. Let us know in the comments how it works out for you. Enjoy!
[Via TechCrunch]