Is there a Siri for Android? Part 1: Iris

One of Apple's biggest advertised features of their new iPhone 4S is Siri.  If you have been living under a rock and not sure what Siri is, I'll fill you in.  Siri is basically a virtual personal assistant that recognizes your voice.  Basically you queue up Siri and tell it what to do.  It can do web searches for you, answer questions, give you information (like what your weather is), schedule calendar events, set alarms, etc.  In short, it's pretty freakin' cool.  And I'm not a huge iPhone fan; but Siri is pretty sweet.

So naturally I set out to see if the Android Market had anything similar to Siri available (knowing I wouldn't find much).  Right off the bat I was surprised to find two apps that claim some of the features that Siri includes.  Both allow for speech in and speech out controlling.  In short, you can chat with the app and it can physically talk back to you.  Fun and yes, a little creepy.  I'll be splitting both apps into two articles.  This is the first.

The first I tried was 'Iris'.  Iris is still in Alpha Development as of this writing but it is fun to play with.  As far as being a productive tool, I can't quite call it that yet.  But it is a blast to screw around with.  The first few minutes spent with Iris was full of laughs and learning.  You can ask Iris to tell you what your local weather forecast is and it will return in voice results with your local temperature, etc.  If you ask it a question about a movie or song it will return information about the source material in question.

The app is somewhat slick looking with a solid, black background and only a blue orb on the screen.  You simply press the orb and when the speech box pops up on screen fire a question or comment at Iris.  Your searches and results will build a list down the screen keeping track of your discussion with Iris.  Within the first few minutes Iris has correctly returned search results about several songs and television characters.  My next question was asking it for the phone number for a local pizza restaurant, which should have been simple enough via a quick web search.

Instead Iris informed me that she "wasn't going to give me her phone number..."  Which was hilarious since I have never tried to "pick up" and electronic device before.  I have noticed with Iris that the correct searches are driven from very clear spoken word.  You also have to go slow sometimes for Iris to understand you.  But the fact that this works as well as it does is crazy.  It's almost like having Jarvis (Tony Stark's AI voice from Iron Man) in your pocket. 

But considering the story behind Iris, it is amazing that the app is already this far along in progress.  Simply put the initial app was developed in around 8 hours by the folks at Dexetra.com.  I look forward to seeing how development on this app progresses.

And if you haven't noticed yet, Iris = Siri spelled backwards. Clever!  It also works on both phones and tablets.

Anyways, if you'd like to check out Iris then swing by the Android Market:
Iris (alpha) on Android Market

Click here: to see my hands-on with Skyvi (another Siri-like app for Android)