ESRA: A Siri-Like Assistant For Older iOS 5 Devices

Let me preface this by saying that ESRA will be a disappointment to those who are expecting it to compete with Siri.

Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, let’s talk more about this jailbreak app. ESRA stands for Experimental Speech Response Application, and as you can see from the video, it more than lives up to the “experimental” portion of the ESRA acronym…

[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xee8SsFL4I0[/tube]

ESRA is still in development, and as its name states, it’s still very experimental. The speech recognition is probably the one area that needs the most improvement, as it pales in comparison to Siri.

In my opinion, the best thing ESRA has going for it is the robot voice. The voice sounds a lot more human than Siri, but that’s probably because it’s just a bunch of canned responses, and not a truly dynamic assistant that’s flexible in responses like Apple’s innovative assistant.

Still, ESRA is a good conversation piece for older device owners if you can happen to get it working. If you’re interested and you have a jailbroken iOS 5 device, you can download ESRA for free from Cydia’s BigBoss repo.

What do you think about ESRA? Is it worth it?