14 DAY TRIAL // Siri, the exclusive iPhone 4S personal assistant app, is about to be given a run for her money. There's a new, one dollar app (0.79 Euro cents for EU customers), which the developers affectionately named Evi, that uses Nuance voice recognition and core semantic search technology to answer every question that comes to mind.
Like Siri, Evi understands both voice and text input, and it keeps track of context when it churns up results.
And you don’t have to use any standard terms or a particular tone of voice. It’s basically Siri with a different name.
It falls short of a few features, like integration with iOS apps (Calendar, Reminders etc.), but it also exceeds Siri in some aspects as well. TechCrunch highlights this example:
Ask “Who was President when Queen Elizabeth II was born”. Siri is unable to provide an answer and suggests performing a web search. Evi determines who Queen Elizabeth II is, when she was born, the dates when she will have been a teenager and then compares this against which US presidents were in office over that time, delivering the results of both serving US presidents during those years. Not bad huh.
According to its developers, “Evi is the revolutionary artificial intelligence here to help with all of your everyday information needs. […] Evi understands what you want to know and gives back exactly what you're after.”
Evi brings up local information for UK and USA, and this includes queries like shopping, news, and dining (as well as others). “Evi knows where you are and gives answers based on your location,” reads the iTunes description.
Other key features of this awesome app include: one-tap words (who, what, when etc); a built in web browser; a learning and adapting intelligence (users can rate Evi’s answers to help her learn more about the world); and over a billion facts stored in Evi’s database.
Evi is compatible with all iPhones and iPod touch players that support iOS 4.0 or later, as well as with all iPad models.