Siri Competitor Evi Arrives, But Already Overloaded

mikejuk writes "Evi, a new rival to Siri, Apple's voice-driven personal assistant, has made its debut on both the iPhone and Android. And people are so keen to that Evi's servers are overloaded — so be prepared for a wait for answers." The app costs 99 cents for iOS users, but it's free on Android.

Good product

[hugh nicks]

I had told my friend about this after reading an article about it. He managed to grab it on his EVO 3D after I told him that Evi's server's seem to be melting, but he said it worked really really well. He recently sent me an email saying that the server's are not melted, but burnt to a crisp. He is no longer getting data from Evi. He knows it's in beta still, but I don't think anyone expected this kind of response. Once they shore up their servers, this app promises to very extremely interesting.

Re:Old news

[ganjadude]

I love all the hate about how its broken it isnt working all the time.... remember when siri came out it was the SAME problem???

Just tried it

[Gumbercules!!]

Just grabbed it from Android market. Tried 3 searches:
1. "Petrol near me" - success - found a petrol station near by, correctly.
2. "Weather today" - failure - said weather coming soon, in the meantime, try accuWeather.
3. "Who is the Prime Minister of Australia" - success - Julia Gillard.


The speech to text was flawless, even on the 3rd one.

Still a gimmick I can't see any real use for. I can Google Voice search on my phone already and I never use it. Maybe there's something else you can do with these things I haven't thought of but for me it seems like Siri it pointless and Evi more so.

Vlingo

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to point out that Vlingo has been out much longer than Siri and is a pretty good alternative on the Android platform (its not as good on the Apple platform). Vlingo is free. I am not sure why people never mention it in these discussions.

Re:Siri on other iDevices

[afabbro]

You have a long career ahead of you as a tech sector executive.

(shrug) Whatever - it really is the answer. One Siri-enabled device takes X CPU power, X bandwidth, etc. There is some internal database scaling, but I doubt the Siri database is huge. Most likely, they have a bajillion x86-class boxes each with a full copy of the database. Every X many Siri devices requires Y many servers.

Somewhere, there's a monitor that reports overall usage. As they get towards the redline, they add more. This kind of scaling is very easy. If they had to present a single consistent copy of data (e.g., credit card processing or something), it would be a lot more difficult.

Re:Not a real competitor to Siri

[hawguy]

Putting all of Siri's capabilities that Evi can't match aside, we still got something that isn't built into the OS like Siri is. I don't see a reason to use this versus Siri unless you are on Android or an older iPhone.

Is that really a factor in evaluating the app? If this app works better than Siri, will you refuse to run it because it's not built-in to the OS? Obviously if it's not better than Siri then there's no reason to switch from Siri.

In this case, Size Does Matter

[guttentag]

So the service is collapsing under the weight of the attention? At the end of the day, a serious Siri competitor can only come from a huge, very well-financed company because Apple sunk a ridiculous amount of money into a data center to support Siri. And they still have tens of billions of dollars in cash lying around. True Knowledge, the company that introduced Evi, has had about $5.2 million in announced financing over the last four years. This is like calling that guy selling strawberries on the street corner "Safeway's competition." He may have good strawberries, but he's not going to make a dent in Safeway's business. He simply couldn't handle that kind of volume. I know we've seen plenty of David and Goliath technology matchups that have been upended, but this technology is only made possible and sustainable by a huge investment. By the time that ceases to be true (when you can run Siri on your phone without reliance on the cloud) Apple will be even further ahead of the field.

Re:Old news

[SoonerSkeene]

That's great thing that I like about Vlingo as well. The only reason I have my default action still on the Google Search voice thing is that it can do a select few things that Vlingo can't, which I use more often. Vlingo is far more full featured than this Evi thing.

I agree about a lot of "been done before" stuff. Heck, my old Windows Mobile 5.x phone going on 8 years ago was able to use voice to "Play X artist" or "What's my next appointment" (still can't do that on Android),... and WinMo didn't even require a server connection to understand my request.

Re:SpeakToIt Assistant

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Yes, and though I love Siri, it would be easy to be the victim of a prank. One of my coworkers used Siri to text my boss the word 'buttface', even though the phone was locked. I can set it to require unlock, and I may have to, but it does affect the usefulness of Siri.

Re:In this case, Size Does Matter

[SoonerSkeene]

My old Windows Mobile 5.x phone going on 8 or 9 years ago was able to use voice to "Play X artist" or "What's my next appointment" (still can't do that on Android),... and WinMo didn't even require a server connection to translate my voice into text. It could even respond to you. Say "Play music", it would ask "what do you want to play? By album, artist, genre, or shuffle?" You could even continue the conversation, just like Siri, by saying "what artists are available?" or something similar.

The only time a connection of any kind was required was if my request spawned a web search or geolocation process, which would be a normal webpage or map loading. I don't see why Apple needs "a huge data center" to handle these requests.