(Image Source: Slashgear.com)

BY CHRISTINA HONAN

ANCHOR ANA COMPAIN-ROMERO

Voice activated personal assistant Siri has been making headlines since Apple announced its iPhone 4S. But Android was not about to let them have all the fun, so it rolled out a voice app of its own — Iris. And yes, that’s ‘Siri’ spelled backwards. One tech blogger gave it a try:

Iris: You asked ‘What is the average rainfall in London?’ (pause) That is not a knock-knock joke. But, what is the average age of people who come to this website.
Iris: You asked, “What is the weather like in London?’ Today, Hayes Middlesex England —
Blogger: That works well enough.

TechCrunch summarizes the app’s basic features:

“Iris allows you to search on various subjects including conversions, art, literature, history, and biology. You can ask it “What is a fish?” and it will reply with a paragraph from Wikipedia focusing on our finned friends.”

A team of developers from Dexetra.com built the Siri knockoff in an 8-hour long “hackathon.” One team member blogged about it on their website:

“It started out as a lazy Friday with half our team missing, the influx of tweets and posts on the ‘Awesome Siri’ were flying everywhere. Suddenly, I got the urge to do something similar for Android ... When we started seeing results, everyone got excited and started a high speed coding race.”

So, how does Iris stack up? TIME’s Techland summarizes some of its ups and downs.  

“Like Siri, [Iris] still has some rough edges to smooth over... The ups: It does word definitions and global time fine. The downs: It can't add, can't convert currencies, won't "open" spoken web URLS and Android's third-party text-to-speech app occasionally garbles terms.”

But one NBC reporter is not impressed, saying that Iris lacks most of Siri's basic functionality such as creating appointments and sending e-mails or texts:

“If your app isn't very good or unfinished, don't send it out or publicize it and add a caveat that it was done in only eight hours. Who cares? We want to see something good and functional, not an outline of things to come. So no, we won't praise Dexetra for churning out a second-rate app simply because it was fast.”

It may be far from perfect as an app, but as a scare tactic, Iris worked flawlessly. At least that’s what Slashgear thinks:

“The takeaway message is that Apple can’t afford to stand still: if a small team of developers can create something like Iris in less than a day, the combined mass of Google’s developers is capable of much, much more.”