There’s been a slew of Siri clones hitting the Android Market ever since the launch of the iPhone 4S.  One of the more popular apps to gain instant recognition was Iris (Siri spelled backwards).  Dexetra, the speech recognition provider behind Iris’s Android app, sees its database expanded under a new partnership with ChaCha, a database algorithm provider for questions and answers. The two mobile partners join hands to add new element to Dexetra’s existing app Iris that uses AI for personalized search on mobile.

Dexetra and ChaCha have decided to work together to create the best app Q & A (Question & Answer) for mobile use.  As part of the partnership, the questions asked by the application will be directed to the ChaCha’s database, permitting conversational questions to be answered in real time.

“ChaCha’s massive database of quality answers will add a lot of value to the Iris app,” said Narayan Babu of Dexetra.

Shortly after the release of the Siri in Apple last year, Dexetra has released its Android app Iris, in order to imitate and try to equal, if not exceed, the software and quality of Siri. Soon after its publication in Android’s market place, the application became very popular thanks to consumer interest in mobile AI implementations. Iris for Android has seen over 1 million downloads within a month of its launch, and has answered tens of millions of user queries.

Making Iris more like Siri

The application, however, is far from functional, crashes often and is affected by a number of bugs, in addition to not responding to voice commands properly most of the time. Dexetra hopes to solve these problems through a partnership with ChaCha.

“We look forward to bringing a new standard of quality to conversational Q&A through this partnership,” said Scott A Jones, chief executive officer of ChaCha.

Attack of the Siri clones

The popularity of Siri opens the door for developers to create better or similar comprehensive search and assistant tools for the Android Market and even Windows Phone. But we have seen there are other developers trying to catch Siri’s lightning in a bottle, though they’ve failed to do so. Most recently there was a fake Siri app that appeared last week in the Android Market, highlighting a growing demand for a Siri-like application for Android.

If rumors are to be believed, Google is working on its own Siri-like app, Majel, to integrate its search engine tool to the voice assistant service.

With the combination of the ChaCha and Iris we can expect an improved and more enhanced voice assistant service for the Android platform, to keep up with Siri and provide an alternative to Android user’s.