Iris: a Siri style app for Android

Iris, a new Android app is developed by a group of application developers in about eight hours in the real hackathon style. This app takes the inspiration from the latest Siri, the voice assistant program implemented in the iPhone 4S. Iris is not the same as Siri as the latter is a personal assistant that is committed to circumvent the Google search. The Android app makes use of the in-built voice search of the operating system and answers the questions on various topics from Wikipedia.

With Iris app, you can ask any question or simply chat with your phone and get results. The application is capable enough to reply your query with relevant pictures and you will be redirected to the corresponding Wiki page as you tap on the result or the image. Currently the app is quite plain and it has many opportunities for improvements in the near future and it is expected to hold many users on its side.

The Android's Iris application is designed to be simple and just a tap on the speech recognition attribute of Android will launch it. The questions asked by the users and the replies made by Iris get displayed in the chat style conversational way. The history of the conversations can be deleted by simply pressing and holding on the mic icon. The app has a couple of frustrations that have to be rectified and the first one is the dependence of the app on the voice recognition feature of Google. It lacks the options to edit a wrong reply or type a question.

The other issue is that the app contains a small information base when compared with the Siri. It seems like there was not sufficient time to program the answers in the app and so there are possibilities for this app to be naïve about some of the questions. The app takes pretty long time to display the answers. It is definitely worth giving a try to the app, as it is an interesting and new one.

The app has an incredible development speed, lot of possibilities for updates in the future and resemblance to the Apple's Siri app are some of the reasons to install it on Android phones. Above all, the application is available for free and it can be downloaded from the Android Market.