Apple used Siri as one of the main selling points for the iPhone 4S and now, we have a version of the electronic assistant on the new iPad as well. Since the launch, hackers have been hard at work trying to port it over to the iPhone 4 and possibly other iOS devices as well. Looking at the Android side, we’ve had Vlingo for a while now, which performs similar basic tasks like Siri, but it appears that developers are taking the idea to the next level. The “Speerit” Android app for instance; it’s currently only available in Korean and the developers have blatantly copied the entire look and feel of Siri, right down to the logo as well.
But not all the apps in the store are just poor rip-offs of Siri. Take Evi, for example. Available Android as well as iOS, this free software can perform many of the same functions as Siri. William Tunstall-Pedoe, the company's founder believes that it’s apps like this that will soon change the way we perform trivial tasks. Evi is still very much a work in progress, so the current version will not be able to send a text message, but ask her age and she’ll reply with something like “one month and 25 days old”. The information in Evi comes from crawling the web, while most of it comes from a database, that’s being constantly updated.
The Android version of the app is likely to see quicker and more frequent updates, as compared to the iOS version after Apple’s recent threat to remove the app from the app store. As Evi becomes more Siri like, it’s obvious that Apple will be all the more cautious in allowing updates. The speech recognition algorithms are similar to what Siri uses and relies on licensed technology that coverts the speech to text and tries to match it with content from the web. You can give Evi a try right now from the Play store or on iOS, in case you don’t have a iPhone 4S.
Won't be a novelty for much longer
But not all the apps in the store are just poor rip-offs of Siri. Take Evi, for example. Available Android as well as iOS, this free software can perform many of the same functions as Siri. William Tunstall-Pedoe, the company's founder believes that it’s apps like this that will soon change the way we perform trivial tasks. Evi is still very much a work in progress, so the current version will not be able to send a text message, but ask her age and she’ll reply with something like “one month and 25 days old”. The information in Evi comes from crawling the web, while most of it comes from a database, that’s being constantly updated.
The Android version of the app is likely to see quicker and more frequent updates, as compared to the iOS version after Apple’s recent threat to remove the app from the app store. As Evi becomes more Siri like, it’s obvious that Apple will be all the more cautious in allowing updates. The speech recognition algorithms are similar to what Siri uses and relies on licensed technology that coverts the speech to text and tries to match it with content from the web. You can give Evi a try right now from the Play store or on iOS, in case you don’t have a iPhone 4S.
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