Evi, a new rival to Siri, Apple’s voice-driven personal assistant, has made its debut on both the iPhone and the Android. And people are so keen to try it out that Evi’s servers are overloaded – so be prepared for a wait for answers.
Just as the media was starting to proclaim that people were getting bored of Siri, the voice-driven personal assistant built into the iPhone4S, we now have Evi for both iPhone and Android.
You can down load Evi from iTunes for $0.99 and for free from the Android store.
Apple’s advantage with Siri was to get it to market, not to have invented the technology. Speech-to-text is tricky, but there are well-known approaches to the problem that work quite well. Text-to-speech is even easier and there is no monopoly here. Language understanding is a bit more of a tough nut to crack, but again there are companies who have been trying for a long time. Mostly these companies have kept their products as server-based APIs that can be used to build other high end services.
True Knowlege, for example, has offered a web-based question-answering service for some time. You can try out its knowledge engine at the website and see how this might work as a Siri competitor because all that is needed to transform this into Evi is the speech processing.