Iris Is (Sort Of) Siri For Android

Context aware software can be built only when rich repositories of background knowledge are available. They don't come cheap. Either you need hordes of linguists and domain experts or you get garbage. One can try using OpenCyc, FrameNet, WordNet or UMLS but it ain't easy. You might as well spent the time on writing Q/A templates for your bot. Hurdles, hurdles, hurdles.<p>Nonetheless, Watson and Apple showed that there is something shiny on the other side of the rainbow.

In all seriousness, they probably should have called it something other than Iris. I'm not a fan of Android these days (since my Galaxy S died on me at a really bad time), but this name will (most likely) fuel the fire of Android being a total rip of iPhone.<p>Of course, I might just be reading too far into the name thing. Their humor is pretty obvious.

No it's not! And that is no suprise:<p>"Suddenly, I got the urge to do something similar for Android. Since we have been working on NLP and Machine learning for over an year now, I had a crazy belief that I could pull this off. " (from <a href="http://blog.dexetra.com/a-day-when-siri-inspired-us-to-create-iris-fo" rel="nofollow">http://blog.dexetra.com/a-day-when-siri-inspired-us-to-creat...</a>)<p>It's cool that they banged up a cool app in a very short time but to think that this in anyway can compete with probably hundreds of man-years of research that went into CALO (what became Siri) and, of course, with Apple's polish is insane (just check these funny Siri comebacks to see this: <a href="http://pocketnow.com/iphone/funny-things-siri-says-screenshot-gallery" rel="nofollow">http://pocketnow.com/iphone/funny-things-siri-says-screensho...</a>).<p>Pushing half-baked apps as competitors to those from Apple with similar functionality will only push more people to iPhones.

We can push buttons, we can touch screens, but the future will be the ability to tell computers what we want them to do with our voice.<p>I hope this future will come in my lifetime as much as the next guy, though so far every time I try speech-to-text and the likes of speech-command software I use it optimistically for the first few days, then give it up.<p>Context aware software with speech recognition might be about to change all of that. And maybe it's going to take another garage startup (think Apple) to make it all fall into place.<p>But 8 hours of work seems like too small an effort if you're wanting to compete with Siri.<p><i>Essentially all they have is a glorified search engine that accepts speech instead of text and gives you a summary of one of the results. This isn't Siri, or anything close.</i>

Are they purposefully mocking the stereotype that Android apps have poor design?

Android has a great voice recognition technology.It works like a dream. Also it's pretty easy to integrate voice-to-text into your applications and again it's very easy to launch apps/do google searchs/open a map/etc in Android with Intents. I've been playing with command voices and writing emails etc since maybe more than a year ago and if you have a little training in NLP (or even if you don't) you realize it's pretty easy to get your Android device to return wikipedia data in a pretty layout or get a few simple "natural language"-like commands working.<p>But what's amazing in Apple's system is not sending an email by saying "email to...". The really cool and difficult part is how the handle paraphrasing and uncertainty. Paraphrasing ("how's the weather today?" x “What is the weather like today?”) and ambiguity resolution ("What's up next" -&#62; shows your next appointments) are still very difficult problems in NLP and even though research has improved lots[1][2] it's still totally non-trivial. The way they got it to work in the phone is in a total different level from what those guys working 8 hours achieved.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.nist.gov/tac/2011/RTE/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nist.gov/tac/2011/RTE/index.html</a><p>[2] <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.3747" rel="nofollow">http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.3747</a>

... has anyone done a cleverbot version? packaged it up as a semi serious app? I think I could have some fun with that

"SpeakToIt" seems a lot like Siri. It seems a lot of companies were already doing this. It's just now that Apple pushed it to its new iPhone that people are really starting to get interested in them.<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myE498nyfGw" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myE498nyfGw</a>

in just 8 hours, they built the app…having already spent more than a year on natural language processing and machine learning. in 8 eight hours they have a working but unpolished simple app that plugs into a lot of research. does anyone else find the sensationalism absurd? "just 8 hours"<p>and a question for HN—what is this fascination with techcrunch? if there is a story out on the interwebs and techcrunch has covered it, it's usually at the top. is it because they do venture capital pieces? is it because green is (was) the color of money? is it because michael arrington held some sort of strange fascination by tech culture at large that has remained now that he's been ousted?<p>i humbly await the downvotes and replies.<p>thanks<p>hacker n00b

When does the narwhal bacon?

Reminds me of this blog post, "How to clone Delicious in 48 hours"[1]. It's cool that these people took their existing work and put a mockup of Siri's UI over it, but getting it to work smoothly and be useful is going to take a lot longer than 8 hours.<p>Besides, Android doesn't even need this, right? I thought it already had a Siri equivalent, and Siri represents Apple yet again playing catchup. Right?<p>On the other hand, Siri has supposedly one of the largest engineering teams at Apple. If a small shop can beat that team at their own game, that would be pretty neat to see. But, I am not holding my breath.<p>[1] <a href="http://notes.torrez.org/2010/12/learn-to-program-in-24-hours.html" rel="nofollow">http://notes.torrez.org/2010/12/learn-to-program-in-24-hours...</a>

Here we go again with the code dashed off over the weekend. Sigh. Will this industry never grow up?