Feeling left out because you don’t have an Apple iPhone 4S and can’t have a relationship with Siri? Don’t despair, True Knowledge this week unveiled Evi, a voice assistant app for Apple OS and Android phones.
Evi is available on Android’s app store for 99 cents and she can also be downloaded from iTunes. According to True Knowledge, Evi uses natural language technology, most likely from Nuance, but the company isn’t saying. True Knowledge is a privately-held company based in Cambridge, U.K.
“You won’t need to use unusual search strings,” says True Knowledge. “You can talk to her like a normal person and she will understand what you are asking. This leads to another difference: you don’t have to type at all. Evi recognizes the spoken word, so you can speak to her out loud or type.”
Using True Knowledge’s semantic technology, Evi links to relevant pages, and gives direct answers. Evi also provides the building blocks of the most popular question phrases meaning you can ask questions with as little as three taps, the company boasts. And even with direct knowledge of almost a billion facts, True Knowledge says that the more questions you ask Evi, and the more you rate her responses, the smarter she becomes and learns about the world.
So far, users aren’t very impressed. Reviewers on the Android market app store it got just 2.3 stars out of a possible 5 star rating.
“Unfortunately the enormous response was more than our servers were able to handle and so many users experienced connection problems,” True Knowledge said. The company has been working on issues around the clock, it said.
“Evi is certainly on the mend and a lot healthier than she was last night, but we’re still busy working to get her back up to full strength so that she won’t suffer in such a way again. Many thanks again to everyone for your patience and understanding,” the company posted on its Facebook site.
While there were lots of grumblings, at least one reviewer gave the app kudos.
“Speech recognition is top notch—it even caught ‘hot wild girls’ rather than ‘Rottweilers’.”
High praise indeed.
