Apple's iPhone 4S Siri voice assistant - a built-in artificially intelligent assistant that responds to spoken queries and commands - certainly wowed the crowds, but it wasn't new: Siri Assistant was available as a stand-alone app for iOS devices before Apple bought the company in 2010.

Meanwhile, other companies have been producing equivalents for rival platforms - including interactivity experts Speaktoit. The Speaktoit Assistant is available right now on Android 2.1 and higher devices, but can it hold a torch to Apple's Siri?

What it promises
Like Apple's Siri, Speaktoit aims to make using your phone more natural. Tying in to Google's speech recognition and synthesis engines, Speaktoit translates your questions into a format it can understand and attempts to figure out what you're trying to do.

Thanks to its farming out of the heavy lifting, the app itself is quite small: at 1.9MB, it's not something that even older Android handsets should struggle to run. The performance is also more than acceptable, although - just like Siri - it requires an active Wi-Fi or mobile data connection in order to operate.

The main feature of Speaktoit is its ability to handle natural language queries. Rather than having to talk to it like a computer, it's supposedly able to parse surprisingly complex commands. While it's happy answering simple sentences like "What's the weather like?", it can also deal with more complex queries like "I need to buy tickets to see Cats," automatically figuring out what it can do to help.

Company: Speaktoit

Contact: Available from the Android Market

Tags: voice assistant android iphone 4s voice-activated android market siri app