Siri For Android Phone?

Ever since Apple launched the new iPhone 4S, the whole world is talking about the new feature called Siri. It calls itself a personal assistant, which can be activated by pressing the Home button on the iPhone. You can ask anything you like to this personal assistant. Siri listens to your voice, finds the answer to the query using built-in apps via Internet and gives you the best possible information. Watch out the demo video to know more about Siri if you haven’t, already.

Siri is only available in iPhone 4S, which is available to buy in a few countries including USA and Japan. If you belong to India or any other country where iPhone 4S hasn’t been launched yet, you’ve to wait for a couple of months to try out this feature, as it’ll be available for purchase in the month of December.

Those of you who are eagerly waiting to get their hands-on with Siri can try this personal assistant on their Android Phones. No, it’s not the official Siri application. An Android developer – Narayan Babu – has developed an application for Android phone that works quite similar to iPhone’s personal assistant Siri.

The Android application, alternative to Siri for Android devices, has been named Iris which is available in the Android Market. It’s currently in its alpha stage but the developers behind the android version of Siri are going to launch the stable version in the very near future. It uses Android’s speech-to-text functions to understand queries.

Iris will talk to you on any topic ranging from Philosophy, Culture, History, science to general conversation. It will listen to your voice and answers your general questions but, as of now, don’t expect Iris as powerful as iPhone Siri. Surprisingly, Narayan babu, with his folks, has built the app in just 8 hours so you can expect some more good features in the coming months.

Like Siri, Iris uses the Internet connection to answer your questions, digging the results from the web. It seems to be as fast as Siri, as it will give you a response in less than 8 secs (worst case). Unlike Siri, it can’t open the applications on your phone through the voice. It’ll be interesting to see whether Iris will be able to provide the same features and cool answers (Almost Anything you ask) as Siri. If it does, there’s no use of buying a new iPhone 4S . Well, time will tell everything.

Iris Android app is now available in the Android market. You need to have "Voice Search" and "TTS library" installed in your phone for iris. to work. Most of the phones have these pre-installed, if not please install them from Android market before you try iris.