Death Inc

http://www.digitaltrends.com/android/android-developers-create-siri-clone-in-just-8-hours/

Android dev team Dexetra has created a clone of Apple's Siri voice recognition assistant, a major feature of the new iPhone 4S.

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.

I have it and as Tony would say "It's Grrrrrreat!"

i have been using Vlingo for a number of months, which does all this (android version).. if you have an iphone 4 or earlier, just download vlingo and voila, you are upgraded... for free...

Saying that Iris or Vlingo do the same thing, at the same level as Siri, is like saying that a horse and cart is equivilent to a 2011 model car... sure they can both, in theory, transport you... but the experience and sophistication between them is the difference here...

Iris' development team even admit that it requires third party addons to make it work, it isn't built into the operating system... and by extension can't take system-wide commands... it is an interface that sits on top of an existing set of commands, that's it.  Vlingo can do voice dictation, take certain actions on behalf of the user etc, but again, isn't built into the OS and can't take half the commands, nor in plain speech, that Siri can.

Don't get me wrong, I think Siri is a bit of a gimmick, and the couple of instances I've seen 4Ss since they've been released, I haven't been all that impressed with it's functionality, however it shits me to tears when so called tech "reporters" or "bloggers" can't even get their basic facts straight...

There's a lot of apps out there in the "control your mobile by voice" category... but nothing compares to Siri at present.

Virgil, in the Imortal words of the interwebs I say to Apple "Tits or STFU" or in normal words show me a list of under the covers new low level commands implemented on ios5 that make Siri more than a natural language control my mobile app and I will believe some of the hype. Otherwise Siri is just another in a long line of same spun by Apple to be something new

Steve Ballmer said it best
You Need to be a Scientist to Use Android

i will also point out that Apple tried to buy Vlingo before they ended up buying Siri. And that Siri was also available for free before apple bought it. Believe the hype from apple as much as you want, and sure, they have tweaked it a bit, and allowed it access to deeper levels of the OS (the same levels apple block devs from accessing which they can access on android), but it is a load of bollocks to claim the difference is that great.  Apple have added an app and a new camera to their existing product , called it "New", and slapped a big price tag on it for the apple fanbois to hand over their money (and it worked).

Mone, it isn't the innovation, it's the refinement... my points still stand, Iris in it's current incarnation is nothing more than a verbal commanded search engine... Vlingo has some decent features, I used it for a while in it's Blackberry form and also on iPhone, but what I mean is Apple has integrated Siri into the OS, it doesn't just search the web, it doesn't just read text messages aloud, from what I have seen of it, you can perform a great many functions in the internal apps using voice... and there's talk now that the APIs will be opened up to allow third party apps to integrate with it as well...

Like I said in my original post, I think it's a gimmick, and to me at least, a dual core processor, Siri and an 8MP camera isn't a good enough reason to upgrade... but for some it is... my point was and still is that it's the most polished integration of a voice control system that I've seen or read about, and having it as a component of the OS (allowed to deeper levels of the OS like cow said) means it can do more than any of the aftermarket apps currently available...

My other point was, and remains, that tech writers really need to wake up and look at the truth before they start writing dribble like this...