While Microsoft and Google are running around in circles trying to work out the best way to compete with Apple’s Siri service, a company called Tronton has launched the first real competitor for Siri on the Android platform. Called Cluzee, it’s dubbed as “your intelligent personal assistant”, which is a nice way of saying “your digital slave”.
The app is available as a free download from the Android Market, and looks to emphasise the ability to delegate tasks to your phone verbally, rather than using your voice to just control the phone. An example given is to tell the phone to book a taxi – it has your phone number and location using the phone’s internal chipsets, so it can do the booking rather than just letting you call a taxi and booking it yourself.
Cluzee allows customisation of what information it offers you, whether it’s Facebook status updates or which emails it will read out to you while you’re driving. It also gives you a detailed rundown of your daily activities to help you keep organised. At the moment it’s an Android-only application, although a cloud-based version is being developed to work across multiple platforms.
The biggest question though is just how well it works in Australia – one of Siri’s largest drawbacks is the lack of key functionality down under thanks to missing partnerships. Whether or not Cluzee suffers the same weaknesses will go a long way to see just how successful it can be.