Five Android Alternatives to Apple’s Siri

I stopped by to watch the the release of the iPhone 4S at the Apple store in Birmingham. The Apple Store employees ran down the 250 metre long queue, shouting and hollering in the minutes leading up to eight o’clock. As the moment grew closer, the employees began a countdown. When it reached zero, they each grabbed a person or two in the queue and ushered them into the store, applauding as they did so.

As an Android fan, it was all rather surreal. Beyond the one actual innovation (Siri), the iPhone 4S is a rather small upgrade, particularly when you compare an iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S both running iOS5 – if you’ve got an iPhone 4S skin on, you can’t tell the difference. Make no mistake, Siri’s a great application, but it’s not as unique a proposition as Apple (or certain over-excited journalists) would have you believe.

Having used Siri myself, there are a few limitations. For one thing, at the moment it can only look for locations and businesses in the US. That’s a bit of a let-down for the English, as it removes a fair amount of things you can do. The dour English voice is also less interesting than the American one as well. Finally, while the speech recognition is good, my Android phone, listening to the same phrase, more often correctly identified what I was saying.

Let’s have a look at some of the alternatives for Android — none stand up to Siri in its totality, but with five good apps to choose from you should be able to find something that works for you.

5. Sonalight Text by Voice

Sonalight’s a pretty simple app – it allows you to draft texts with your voice, which might be useful if you’re driving and don’t want to take your hands off the wheel. It also reads your texts back to you, but that’s where the feature list ends. If you’re only likely to use this functionality though, it’s a pretty neat solution.

4. Speaktoit Assistant

If you’d like to look at the assistant you’re ordering around (why, I cannot imagine), then Speaktoit Assistant is the one for you. It knows a few things about context and understands natural speech, and is capable of retrieving the weather and directions. You can also update your Facebook and Twitter statuses, manage tasks and convert currencies. It’s a surprisingly competent system, but the creepy synthesised voice and customisable avatar are a bit off-putting.

3. Google (Voice Search, Translate)

Google’s own Voice Search (and Voice Actions) have quite a few options, although they’re not always interpreted correctly. You can send text messages, initiate calls, get directions, listen to music and search Google, among other things. There’re no natural language options here, unfortunately.

As a side note, Google Translate has recently been upgraded to support speech-to-speech translation in twelve languages, a cool little feature that should definitely be integrated into the Android OS.

2. Edwin

Edwin’s unique feature is that, like Siri, it’s hooked to that incredibly clever information engine Wolfram Alpha. This means you can ask, and get answers for, anything that Wolfram Alpha knows. That includes mathematics, statistics, physics, conversions, dates, weather, geography, people, words… The list goes on and on. While Edwin isn’t a particularly novel implementation of a speech to Wolfram Alpha interface, it is one of the best parts of Siri and it’s nice to see it here.

1. Vlingo Personal Assistant

Vlingo is the closest alternative to Siri. While it doesn’t have a concept of context (e.g. knowing who your brother is, knowing where you are, having a continued conversation instead of one-shot commands), it still provides hands-free functionality for many of your phone’s default apps — you can send messages, emails, Twitter and Facebook updates. You can also perform Google searches, open apps and get directions. There’s also an option to have incoming messages read aloud.

Vlingo is free, but it costs $2 to remove the ads. There are also versions available for BlackBerry, Nokia, iOS and Windows.

Conclusion

While none of these truly stand up for Siri, at least you can partially mirror the functionality. Siri’s definitely good fun (confessing my love to Siri and receiving the response ‘ You are the wind beneath my wings’ was a highlight), but whether it’ll actually find use in the real world once the novelty wears off is another thing entirely.

Innovation is always a good thing though, because now the onus is on Android developers to come up with true Siri alternative if that’s really what the public wants. As more new users try Siri, expect interest in the app to die out, or similar apps to appear for Android.

Siri’s definitely good fun (confessing my love prompted an interesting response), but whether it’ll actually find use in the real world once the novelty wears off is another thing entirely.

What do you think?

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