Download Iris On Android Similar to Siri On iOS

You may have read what Andy Rubin said about Apple’s newly introduced Siri Voice Assistant in iPhone 4S at AsiaD conference that “Smartphone users should talk to people, not to their devices”. Well, you can see that it was an initial poking to the new product from Apple, but another report states that a development team, Dexetra from Android was working very hard to develop a product in competition to the Siri, named as “Iris”.

Improved Version Of Voice Input Engine Of Ice Cream Sandwich Coming Soon

So, we will have to go against Andy Rubin on this one and go with Dexetra because we will also love to talk to an Android running smartphone. Well, amazingly, it took only six to eight hours for Dexetra to create the first alpha of their own version of voice input personal assistant for Android, Iris. So, it is obvious that Android’s new build, the 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich will be coming with a much improved version of voice input engine, but that’s not our concern right now. As we are anticipating for this new ray of hope to be launched soon.

Siri Like Feature For Android

According to a blog post at Dexetra’s official blog:

“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. 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.”

Just a week later, guys at Dexetra had worked on Iris and improved it so much, as their blog post states:

“The revised alpha looks nothing like it did before, moving beyond mere questions to allow further conversations about the same topic.”Even ask her how she is feeling today, whether she likes something etc. You can also try those Siri like wacky questions and Iris will give you sarcastic answers,”

So, after Iris reached the Android Market, we got our hands on it and asked “how are you feeling today”. Initially, it responded with an “Oi”. So, we asked again and this time it stated that she was feeling sleepy. Well, I used She for it, because it is a real Female AI, and we did not know how to continue this conversation. So, we asked Iris that how is the weather today, and she replied “it’s sunny, like a proper spring”.

So, I needed to have further discussion with it, I asked, “Will it rain?”. Iris replied that a typhoon was coming. Well, it was not looking like that outside so we asked that where exactly this typhoon is? Iris replied cleverly in a flat voice that “On the earth, duh,”.

As you can see that Iris is a lot more fun that Siri, and you can have a proper conversation with your device in a very cool and fun way. In addition to the awesome conversation, Iris is also able to pull up images and links where applicable. According to the developers:
“We have added a few more fact engines to the mix. Now iris has an enhanced knowledge base. So expect more questions to be answered.”

You can get Iris for your Android device from Android Market now. Here take a look at the first Iris review video uploaded by the popular XDA Developers: