Samsung’s Galaxy S III announcement was either a roaring success or an abysmal failure, depending on your affiliations. Regardless of your feelings on the phone or indeed that whacky announcement event, what you cannot ignore is the fact that Samsung’s software is arguably the star of the show. Or that was the plan.
Those that have followed along will know that S Voice is Samsung’s answer to Apple’s digital assistant, Siri. When we say it’s their answer to Siri, what we really mean is it’s their clone, but that’s par for the course, right?
Samsung will have been hoping that S Voice, along with the various other fancy, and sometimes odd, software additions to the Galaxy S III would help to sell handsets. The problem is, that software has already begun leaking out to the internet at large, (see Flipboard for Android) with S Voice now available to download and install on a wide range of Android devices.
Having tested S Voice on our trusty Galaxy Nexus running on top of Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich, we can safely say that it works, just like it should!
Reports are already circulating that the downloadable version of S Voice is currently working fine on a collection of Android ROMs, with CM9 and AOKP the two we have had confirmation of. We suspect others are also working, too.
The news that one of Samsung’s crown jewels has found its way out of its palace and into the hands of the paupers will no doubt be a disappointment for those in charge at the Korean firm. With the Galaxy S III smartphone being so hotly anticipated and roundly disappointing once it was announced, the software was left as the only real selling point for a device that was expected to sell by the millions. While this leak of S Voice may not reduce those numbers too much, the fact that S Voice is now available for use on Android phones that are not Samsung’s latest and greatest will presumably be at the very least irritating for the team behind it.
S Voice will allow users to interact with their smartphone using real language, just as Apple’s Siri does. Asking your phone where a location is and having it answer back never really grows old, but as has been the case with Siri, users may find that novelty and real world use are two very different things indeed.
(Thanks Xulfi for the hat tip! | Source: XDA-Developers)
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