Android Siri competitor ‘Iris’ now powered by ChaCha database

Android voice assistant app ‘Iris’ is now powered by ChaCha’s information database providing a database similar to one provided by Wolfram-Alpha for the iPhone 4S’s ‘Siri’. While ’Iris’ is not exactly up there with ‘Siri’ in terms of voice recognition it is free first of all and with future development it surely has the potential to pose a challenge to Apple’s Siri. Apart from this with ChaCha powering its answer engine it has access to a very large database arguably larger than Wolfram-Alpha, because we noticed that at time for responses ChaCha was syndicating content from Wolfram-Alpha.
In our testing when we tried “Call my mum” the software kind of froze and got locked in a “Call who” loop, but I guess this happened because the app does not have OS level API access like the way ‘Siri’ does which enables it to access functions like contacts with ease and even remember assigned names. Interestingly Google is also speculated to be working on its own ‘Siri’ competitor called ‘Majel’ named after Majel Barrett Roddenberry, the voice of the computer in iconic Sci-Fi TV series Star Trek. So it looks like Apple is in for a lot more competition.

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Posted in: Android