Speaktoit Assistant aims to be exactly what it is called – your personal assistant. With an interface that is extremely simple to use, as it is based primarily on voice commands. To use this app, you must create an account, or alternatively you can log in with Facebook. The basic account is free, and you have the option to upgrade to a premium account, which I’ll come back to a bit later.
Speaktoit Assistant App Review
When you open up Speaktoit Assistant for the first time, you are greeted by your assistant, who asks for your name, and gives you the option of changing hers. A short tutorial follows, explaining how to interact with her, and what sorts of things she can do for you.
Once through the tutorial, you are free to put your assistant to work. Your assistant’s avatar is displayed on the top two-thirds of the screen, below that is a text readout of any command you give her and her response, and there are five buttons at the bottom. By and large, you only need to use one button: the microphone button, which allows you to give voice commands.
But there is also a button to mute your assistant, a button to input text commands, a skills button, and a settings button. The skills button is helpful, as it lists all of the commands that you can give your assistant, and by tapping on any of them, it will give an actual example of this command in action.
Speaktoit Assistant Customizations and Commands
In case you get bored with the look of your assistant, you can customize the appearance of the avatar. Choose a man or a woman, and change their clothing, hair, eyes, nose, mouth, and more. There are enough combinations to last you years here.
As far as specific commands that you can give your assistant, there are quite a few. They range from finding information, maps, news or stock information, to updating your Facebook status or sending a Tweet, to playing YouTube videos, to making calculations or conversions. In practice, this app did a great job for the most part with all of these, but there’s only one problem: Siri can do just about all of this too.
I did find, however, that Speaktoit Assistant tended to think a little bit quicker, whereas Siri often takes a long time to respond to commands, and sometimes even would tell me that she couldn’t help me at that moment. The one really neat feature with Speaktoit Assistant – that Siri can’t keep up with – is the language translation. Simply say a word or phrase and ask for it to be translated. I’m not sure exactly how many languages this will work with, but I tried about 10 different ones and had no problem getting a translation. Pretty nifty.
The other nice part about this app is the conversation mode. With this, if more information is needed from you, the microphone will automatically activate without you having to press the button. You can go back and forth with your assistant, actually carrying on a conversation, for quite some time.
To upgrade to the premium version, it will cost you $5.99 for a lifetime membership, or $2.99 per month. Kind of a no-brainer there. Some of the features include voice activation, different assistant voices (Male or Female, with different accents), the ability to accessorize your assistant, and an ad-free version. You can also teach your assistant to reply with its skills to commands that you determine.
There is lots of talk within the app about the assistant actually learning. And though there aren’t too many specifics, it is sort of hinted at it two ways. First, that the developer is still “teaching” it how to do certain things, and second, that it will somehow learn as you use it more. As I said, not many specifics here, but it seems interesting at the least.
Speaktoit Assistant has lots of features and functionality, and pretty consistently does exactly what it is asked. The conversation mode makes it simple and fun, and the ability to translate phrases and words quickly to different languages is really cool. Speaktoit Assistant is easy to use, and can perform a ton of tasks for you. Though Siri is able to do a lot of the same things, this app has a few unique features, and tends to move a bit faster than Siri does. And since the basic version of Speaktoit Assistant is free, it certainly can’t hurt to give it a whirl.
Get Speaktoit Assitant from App Store
Ravi Shankar says
This is cool though its not upto the mark when we compare it with siri or google now.