What is iris2.0
After the "8 hour version" of Iris hit the market, we got a lot of unprecedented feedback and support from the community and so we started working on a much more serious and powerful iris. Actually the original iris, recognized the question, understood it and pulled relevant information from the web (from various points) all from the phone. Though it might sound impressive it was far from perfect. Phones cannot do any reasonable Natural Language Processing, also fetching information from different websites meant lot of data traffic. So we wanted to create an iris server which would take up the question from phone, churn it, and spit out the answer back to the phone. The actual phone app has very little left to do, it had to format the response and present it. All the intelligence now goes to our server, which is in Amazon Cloud. With 2 weeks effort we created a better (and scalable) framework for iris, with the cloud having an important role.
The failed launch
Last monday, we had published the cloud based iris2.0 to Android Market, with a modest Amazon instance powering the API and serving answers. I published the app at around 2:00 am, but by 7:30 am, when I woke up, to my shock, the server had wounded up. We were serving around half a million answers a day, and our modest Instance could not hold on for even 6 hours. To make matters worse, since our Dexetra office was getting relocated, our workforce was cut down to half. It was really tough.
The real 2.0
For the last one week, we have been trying to optimize the API code and the server instance type, so that we can serve as many requests we get without causing any delay. We have also made a lot of improvements to iris's capabilities since now we have a lot of horse power. After days of rigorous load testing and optimization we have published iris2.1 at last. It is capable to serving millions of requests daily without even slowing down. So, the new iris (v2.12a as of now) is much different from 1.0 though it may look similar. The whole architecture gets an overhaul, we can also push updates to you much much faster.
What next
The major visible change you might have noticed in 2.0 is location awareness. She can now find you restaurants, coffee shops, ATMs, police stations and what not. We are getting back our focus to adding new features since our framework is in place. So get ready to find new capabilites of iris every week. We are so excited to read those positive comments from you, we will make sure we get that from you by giving you interesting updates.
-Narayan
