Look out Siri, Android is on your back. As the hype around iPhone 4S new PA turns to uncertainty, the green man has come running with Iris – Android answer to Siri.
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Although Google Voice has been a fixture on Android’s for ages, Google has retaliated to Siri with Iris – a cool and open chick and will let you asks her anything from worlds of art, literature, history, and even biology.
(And note, Iris is Siri spelt backwards, clever eh?)
According to TechCrunch, Iris was built by Dexetra.com, in an 8 hour hackathon and will be coming to the Android Marketplace as an app “soon.”
This comes as Google Android’s head of development Andy Rubin gave Siri a dressing down at AsiaD conference this week, stating: “You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone.”
“I don’t believe that your phone should be an assistant. Our phone is a tool for communicating.”
However, he rejected the technology was anything new, pointing out that Google founder, Rich Miner, invented something similar
but Google choose not to go down that path.
“We’ll see how pervasive it gets,” he declared.
And so to Apple Siri, the “intelligent assistant” – a backlash appears to be going on among the tech community with many fearing it is a security timebomb waiting to happen, and leaks information – even if the iPhone is locked.
This means a hacker can easily access e mails, text, and appointments, since Siri is designed to work even when phone is locked with a protection code. The only way around this oversight is to turn Siri off before you lock the handset.
And as pointed out by Your Daily Mac, Siri lacks voice recognition so cant differenciate between users, meaning previous searches may also be leaked. However, Apple have said Siri is a beta version at present, meaning fix-ups could be on the way.
Here’s what one iPhone 4S user told SmartHouse:
Siri “seems to be biased towards the United States – I can’t get it to locate things in my location. Ultimately I struggle to see how it would be quicker or any way more efficient than googling a question, and as for calling people, you need to use your fingers to tap it to get going so you’d have called the person you were going to ask Siri to by the time you set it up to speak to it!
“Its quirky and fun but I think it will be a highly unused device on my iPhone and I’d almost go as far as saying the novelty has worn off already!”
