When apple unveiled Siri on the iPhone 4S, we, Android owners became really jealous of it. Further, all the youtube videos and funny conversations with Siri (StuffSiriSaid) added more salt to it.
Behold! Narayan Babu, with his Dexetra team, has built a personal assistant app (sort of), similar to Siri – Iris. Yepp, that’s Siri spelled backwards. What’s interesting to note here is that he built this funky app within 8 hours in a hackathon. The name has also got a crazy expansion – Intelligent Rival Imitator of Siri.
Download: Iris
Iris has a very good sense of humour and it can pull answers from the web for various questions. I asked it a lot of questions and it gave accurate answers (and some interesting as well). It’ll also display images when possible which would be click-able, linking to the topic. Also, the interface is very neat, except the splash screen.
I played it for about an hour and I must say, this is an amazing work done in such a short span of time.
What it is not
Iris is not Siri. It is simply like your friend whom you can talk with but do not expect it to do stuffs that Siri can do like adding an event to the calendar, calling or texting someone, pulling map results etc. It would have been mind blowing if did these though.
What to expect in the future?
I really hope the developer continues working on it and turns it into a real virtual assistant. In simple words, Iris + Vlingo + more cookies is what I’m looking for.
The developer made it within a day so I cannot expect more from it right now. If you’re looking for a personal assistant app which can do the above things for you, simply try Vlingo. You can command it to send emails, call a friend, update your facebook status, finding a restaurant etc.
Credit goes to TechCrunch for discovering Iris.
