Siri competitors for Android are a dime a dozen, but the latest alternative Evi may have the winning combination of a voice recognition engine that actually understands what you say and what (we hope) appears to be a natural language processor that can figure out what you want.
Unlike a standard search engine which performs keyword searches, Evi aims to answer your query with a specific response. So, for example, if want to know what the capital of France is, you would ask Evi "what is the capital of France?" and Evi would respond "Paris". Evi is also good with contextual questions, so if your next question is "is it dark there now?", Evi would understand that you want to know whether it is past sunset in Paris.
Next, Evi is able to answer comparison questions like "who is older Barack Obama or Michele Obama?". Additionally, it stays on top of current affairs, so you can ask it "who is the president?" and it will give you the correct answer.
Evi is also aware of its own existence and can answer questions about itself.
The biggest problem with Siri is that it works best within the borders of the United States, so Evi might just be the alternative the rest of the world (and Android users) is looking for.
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In my opinion (yes, I know everyone has an opinion and no one cares about anyone elses) if it doesnt work right out of the gate, then it loses my interest and I delete... right after I 1 star it and then report to Google that it is harmful to the phone since I have no idea if it wants me to download the app and then steal my voice, scan information, etc.
Stop spreading FUD.
@William If you've never launched a product it's easy to dismiss a launch day breakdown as shotty development work. All products like these go through rigorous internal testing, and the developers themselves often dogfood a product for months before they ever consider releasing it into people's hands. Truth of the matter is, things happen. Servers get overloaded from unexpected demand, unexpected bugs crop up that simply weren't found in internal testing, etc.
Everyone just does the best they can, developers included. Try to be less of a stick in the mud and be a little more positive.
Wow, that is a ridiculous overreaction.
What evidence could you possibly have that it is trying to steal your information. What if the app doesn't have those permissions?
Also: Steal your voice? Really?
Don't be a dick.
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I feel the same way, if my wife messes up my dinner in any way my first reaction is to beat her to death, because I have no idea if she's trying to poison me or not.
+1 . gold reply award.
Sounds great, but I hope they will add more OS device integration. Having the ability to dictate SMS, Email, voice dialing, etc. is more important for me.
Agree their server situation has to be corrected to accomplish the task and get user acceptance. Further, selecting 'setting' requires connection to facebook and full assess to your data (profile, friends, ect.). Does anyone see a problem with this? Tutorial is not a tutorial as needed, only indicates phraseology to use. A true tutorial is needed to better understand all unique usage parameters.
too bad my device isn't suppored. i am on an acer a500 and cant get it from the market.
Wait...
It wants to steal my voice? I need that!
Aside from the server issues, it looks pretty good. Seems like a well-polished piece of work.
I worked in software development for 30 years, including on-line systems. No matter how much you test and simulate a system, it always gets overhhelmed the first day. In the first moon landing, the computer was overloaded and Neal Armstrong had to manually override the computer. That thing had been tested for years but it had never tried to land in a boulder field on the moon.
Of course my watch is more powerful than the computer on the Lunar Lander and my phone has many times the capicity of the ground computers that controlled the flight of Apollo 11.
The biggest thing i am interested in regards to Siri is being able to use custom commands. (Siri Proxy).
I wish there was a way to accomplish this on Android at the moment =(
I'll try it out tomorrow, if I remember.
Probably time to break out Speaktoit again. I haven't used it in a while, but it was the best one out there a couple months ago, so it was the standard that I held all the other ones to. I bet the developers have continued to make it better over the month and a half that I've left it unused.
Hopefully this recognizes speach better than siri. My friend doesn't even use siri anymore because it returns what he was looking for about half of the time. I do think Evi needs to be able to launch and use other apps like email and text before it can be a true siri competitor.
A note on launch day disasters:
Worked for a dotcom once, we were switching from a rinky dink server to El Servers Magnifico. From 7 underpowered windows systems barely holding on to 14 overpowered linux boxes.
They slammed the linux boxes with everything they had, were able to simulate 40 times the load the windows boxes had - they were dead certain everything was going to work out of the gate.
Then, switch day came, and with half the load the windows boxes had, the linux boxes went down.
The fiasco happened because they tested 40x the load, but not half the load with people sending server requests at 14.4K, slapping refresh, using webtv, and getting disconnected randomly.
What happened was when they opened it to all the crappy hardware and connections on the net, they discovered a 14.4k dialup user would use more resources than a cablemodem user hitting refresh constantly, due to them keeping socket connections open forever.
I sort of imagine that's probably what happened with EVI (day two and it's still unusable)
I downloaded this and Dragon Go yesterday, both have enormous potential. Probably narrow down which one to keep after giving them some real life tests.
Evi has been fine for me lately, and I really like it, which is a first for these kinds of apps on Android.