The Daily App: Speaktoit Assistant for Android

Sam is the female, digital persona of Speaktoit Assistant, a free download from the Android Market that acts as a voice-activated, speech-recognition-based virtual assistant for Android devices.

Produced by the developer Speaktoit, Speaktoit Assistant’s Sam will listen to your commands and questions and try her best to provide you with answers or information. Sam will read you your calendar items for the day, let you know if you have new Gmail, and even tell you the time or the temperature outside.

With far less fanfare than the market has showered Apple’s Siri with, which is available in the new iPhone 4S devices, Speaktoit Assistant’s Sam really does try her best to be helpful. However, it does take some time for the software to understand much of what you say and even more of what you mean. (Siri does a much more accurate job of understanding a user right out of the box. We found Sam to accurately understand what we said about 40 percent of the time.)

Speaktoit Assistant also has other digital personas, both male and female, in case you want to mix it up a little. If you’ve got an Android device, and a little time to let Sam get to know your voice and your meanings, it’s hard to go wrong by giving Speaktoit Assistant a try. But just be forewarned: Sam’s not yet up to a head-to-head fight with Siri so you may want to postpone any competition with your iPhone 4S-using friends.