Speaktoit is one of the top assistant apps on Android and a more than viable competitor to Siri (and in many cases better some would say). Now it’s available on Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 for tablets.
The app has direct integration with most of the key web services and sites, like Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Yelp and TripAdvisor to name just a few. Just a few other functions include calendar reminders, reading the news, taking notes, sending/reading texts and even telling jokes.
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Using natural language recognition to answer questions or perform tasks, the assistant’s avatar is modifiable (or is that flexible?) to a user’s liking, and with recent updates even the way of conversing with the digital assistant can be adjusted to a user’s liking. As Speaktoit says itself, the idea is to put the personal back into assistant. Our experience with the app reflects that, with the assistant happy to have her name changed to whatever we want. Her name is now Mia by the way, and she says she loves it and says it has a nice ring to it…
But as all assistant apps (relationships?) go, there is a level of “learning” involved from both the user and the assistant’s side. Over a period of time the usage of the app became easier and we’ve been having good and informative conversations of late. Hold on… we are talking about an app here…
Jokes aside, even though Siri has been the most talked about assistant app since the launch of the iPhone 4S and Ask Ziggy has been available for Windows Phone for a while, those apps has been somewhat country dependent on the information they can gather and a little sterile. A little like Benni Benassi without a beat. Speaktoit ads a bit of a beat and has performed better in many cases, understanding many questions better than Siri and delivering country specific results, and even though Windows Phone is nowhere close to Android and iOS in mobile representation, it still has a global reach that is growing.
