Are you a fan of voice-based helpers like Apple’s Siri and Google’s Now/Voice Search? They’re both quite technically amazing, but both are only available for a limited number of devices, with Siri being only for 2011-2012 devices and Google Now only for Jelly Bean devices. Maluuba is different: billing itself as a “do-engine”, Maluuba lets you organize your life, open apps, and run searches with just the normal English language you use every day.

Like in Google Voice Search and Siri, you can do searches of any type from the main screen: restaurants, people, knowledge searches, and more. Like Siri, it’s backed by both Google and Wolfram Alpha, meaning you can do powerful math searches and other data searches you can’t do on Voice Search. Like Voice Search, it’s backed by Google’s powerful search and location databases, so you’re never in need of another assistant.

Maluuba’s natural voice recognition works amazingly well. I told it “I want Chinese food”, and it filtered out the unnecessary words and searched for nearby Chinese food. The same happened when I asked for it to create an event for a friend’s birthday party: it my words almost perfectly, and figured out exactly what I wanted. It’s actually much more impressive than Google Now, which is quite laggy on my two-year-old phone.

Hate voice search? The creators of Maluuba understand, and every section is accessible by both voice and type. Maluuba is definitely my favorite of the big names in natural voice parsing and commands, as it’s both smooth (making it better than Voice Search), knowledgable (making it better than S Voice), and good-looking (making it, in my opinion, better than Siri). Anyone at all interested in navigating their life with voice input should definitely try out Maluuba.

Price: Free!

Version discovered: v1.0.2

Requires: Android 2.3.3+

Download size: 3.8MB

Maluuba on Play Store