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Indigo pushes Siri-like features to multiple platforms
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BARCELONA, Spain–Want to challenge Siri to schedule every aspect of your busy life but don’t want an iPhone? Great news for you then as Artificial Solution’s Indigo service brings similar functionality to Android, Windows Phone 8, and your Web browser. Better yet, it’s completely free.
Indigo works in much the same way as Siri; ask it your question and it will use its various channels — Web searches, a built-in catalog of commands, and, also like Siri, Wolfram Alpha information — to perform the required task.
The usual requests of “What is the weather doing in Barcelona this week?” are handled perfectly well and it’s also able to create appointments, open apps, and dictate and send e-mails or post statuses to your social networks of choice. Unlike Siri, though, Indigo is available across multiple platforms and also lets you use one account to sync across them all.
The benefit of this is that if you begin creating an appointment on your Windows Phone device then switch to your Nexus 10 Android tablet, your previous requests will already be there waiting for you. You can then finish off your searches without going through all the previous stages. Just think of it like updating a document in Google Docs and loading it up on a different machine.
The app itself looks neat and simple and was mostly accurate at recognizing words, even with the excessive background noise of the Mobile World Congress crowd.
It’s coming soon to the Windows Phone 8 and Android app stores and will be available through your Web browser, too. Artificial Solutions also explained that it’s working with “major TV manufacturers” to integrate it into their TV’s smart functions, although didn’t have concrete times as to when to expect it. I’d also like to see it come into cars, letting you perform all your essential smartphone tasks without taking your eyes off the road — Artificial Solutions didn’t indicate that this is on the horizon as yet, though.
