Another Siri Clone Arrives on Android: Cluzee

Cluzee is your "talking" intelligent virtual personal digital assistant for Android, dishing out social media monitoring, day planning and more.

Earlier this month we test-drove an Android app called Iris which tries to bring the Apple Siri experience on the iPhone 4S to Google's mobile platform. Users can check the weather, send text messages, search topics and contacts, ask personal questions and more. The app was a lot of fun and free to download and install, but required a separate installation of "Voice Search" and "TTS Library" apps.

Now another Siri clone has emerged: Cluzee from Illinois-based start-up Tronton LLC. The company deems the app as a "talking" intelligent virtual personal digital assistant that uses voice recognition, voice synthesis, personal analytics, smart filters and machine learning technologies. With all of that, the app would seemingly be self-aware, but it's not: it can't even respond with the correct answer when asked "who are you?"

"People are drowning in information overload," said Ashish Patwa, CEO of Tronton. "We don't need all of the information available, all of the time. We just need the right information at the right time, which Cluzee intelligently provides, making us more productive. Technology created the problem, but we're using smarter technology to solve it."

Unlike the version of Iris we tested earlier this month, Cluzee provides the user with services like day planning, a health planner, personalized restaurant and retail recommendations, a trip planner, social media monitoring, and a daily briefing of personalized digital information. It supposedly talks to the user and responds to their commands, delegates tasks, and allows the user to create and manage text memos and reminders.

"Cluzee lets users set filters for social updates," the company said in a press release. "Instruct Cluzee to immediately inform you if tweets/FB updates come from a group of users, and even customize what news, weather and traffic are included in your brief. Personalized recommendations and daily deal filtering based on your personal digital profile save you money on things you love, while weeding out offers that you're not interested in. A trip planner helps you map out your vacation and find local attractions."

Cluzee is the first offering from Tronton, and future generations will supposedly run in the Cloud and be accessible from all devices including mobile phones, tablets, desktops, laptops, TVs and the Web. Unfortunately, the current version weighs a hefty 21.10 MB after installing it to an Android device, and doesn't offer App2SD support, so those with very little internal storage may want to steer clear until the app can be moved off the phone or tablet.

Currently Android owners are reporting force closings, the inability to understand many questions and other problems plaguing the launch. Looks as though Tronton has a few bugs to work out until it's a solid Siri alternative.