I’ve never particularly got on with spoken phone search apps, but I can see the utility for those with particular disabilities, or those driving. The latest Android app to hit the Australian marketplace comes via a bit of serious Spanish translation.
Sherpa is the product of Xabier Uribe-Etxebarria, and the name’s something of a giveaway (as if the headline wasn’t) — he’s a Spanish developer, and Sherpa is multilingual (because it was Spanish first) and claims to have better predictive and interactive facilities than Siri, which is usually held up to be the gold standard for this kind of application. Well, either that or Apple’s relentless marketing of Siri means that it’s the app with the most mindshare, anyway.
The Beta version of Sherpa is available as a free download from Google Play from today, and the claim is that it can recognise Australian voices and lingo.
Here’s Sherpa’s official promo video:
So I gave it a test run…
A lot of searches default to online, but that’s fine.
It does mean, however, that if your connection goes down, Sherpa won’t guide you anywhere — just the same as any other app, it’s sending your audio files off for processing.
They’ve tried to give it (something) of a sense of humour…
Bonus points for spelling “Colour” correctly. Colour me impressed.
It’s rather noise sensitive, though. I was testing on an HTC One, and it didn’t seem to want to answer this rather specifically Aussie question. Perhaps it doesn’t know?
Update: Moving to a much quieter location finally got the point across. I guess it passes that pesky citizenship test after all.
