Maluuba, a Voice Based Personal Assitant for Smartphones, Launches Complete Version in India

Maluuba, a voice based personal assistant, is now launching its complete version in India. Often drawing comparisons to Apple Siri, Maluuba now attempts to gain traction in the Indian market where Siri’s  presence is insignificant.Maluuba has built the voice activated ‘do engine’ that enables users to speak naturally to their Android smart phones and get things done.  This returns exact results instead of web links returned by modern search engines is a paradigm shift in the search industry.

Using the complete version, users in India can now ask questions like “I want to watch the Karan Johar movie Student of the Year in Bandra”, and Maluuba would understand the context and location of the user’s query and return a set of appropriate movie theaters and showtimes.To find their favorite food, users in India can ask queries naturally like “Where can I get malai kofta near New Delhi” and get the appropriate  places. Although Maluuba is similar to Apple’s Siri in the fact that it recognizes voice queries, it has marked interface and design differences.

A key difference is that Maluuba doesn’t talk back to you – it just gives direct results in a clean interface. Here’s a video comparison of Maluuba and Siri.

Maluuba’s CEO, Sam Pasupalak, mentioned “When we launched our international beta last month, we found out that the largest proportion of our users came from India. We realized that India has a growing market of Android users and we wanted to release a full  version here to give users in India the complete experience. Further, most people in India cannot use Siri since iPhones are expensive, hence this would give the Android users a chance to start adopting the new voice based search paradigm”.

Maluuba currently supports 18 different categories ranging from entertainment  (restaurants, movies, local events, music) to social (facebook, twitter) to organization (calendar, call, email). In order to provide all the above information, Maluuba has partnered with industry leading content providers like Yelp, Google Places, Wolfram Alpha, Youtube, Facebook, Wikipedia and many more.

Maluuba launched at the Techcrunch Disrupt Conference in San Francisco in mid September 2012. Since then, it has been received very positively by the technology community.

Find out more about Maluuba.

If you’re an Android user, download Maluba here.