Major tech companies like Apple and Microsoft have been able to provide millions of people with personal digital assistants on mobile devices, allowing people to do things like set alarms or get answers to questions simply by speaking.

Now, other companies can implement their own versions, using new open-source software called Sirius — an allusion, of course, to Apple’s Siri. Today researchers from the University of Michigan are giving presentations on Sirius at the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems in Turkey.

Meanwhile, Sirius also made an appearance on Product Hunt this morning. “Sirius … implements the core functionalities of an IPA (intelligent personal assistant) such as speech recognition, image matching, natural language processing and a question-and-answer system,” the researchers wrote in a new academic paper documenting their work.

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