Sherpa, a voice-activated Android competitor to Apple's Siri virtual assistant has launched in the US, with support for automated funds transfer between PayPal accounts.
Since it launched for Spanish speaking countries in October, Sherpa has been downloaded almost half a million times. Much like Apple's Siri, users can ask Sherpa to play a song, book a flight, update a Facebook status and call up stock prices, among other things.
Unlike Siri, Sherpa also offers support for money transfers to via PayPal to a user's mobile contacts. To access the service, users have to declare that they are over 18 and, for the moment, may only send up to a maximum of $5 to the specified account.
The product, which is still in beta, can be downloaded from the Google Play store.
News of Sherpa's launch comes as e-commerce retailer Amazon moves into the voice recognition market with a $26 million acquisition of Siri clone Evi, which works on both Apple and Android devices.