Siri Competitor Evi Arrives, But Already Overloaded

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Siri Competitor Evi Arrives, But Already Overloaded

Posted by timothy on Sunday January 29, 2012 @01:58PM from the but-how-much-does-evi-resemble-microsoft-bob? dept.

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.

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Siri on other iDevices by sonicmerlin · 2012-01-29 14:06 · Score: 4, Insightful

This is the real reason Siri's available only for 4S users. Apple added 37 million new iPhone customers last quarter, with the vast majority of those buying 4S's. It's actually pretty amazing they've been able to keep up with the computational and server requirements of all those Siri users with hardly any major hiccups. I've heard of maybe 2 significant Siri outages, and those lasted for very short periods of time. People wanting Apple to extend Siri to all 200 million+ iOS users are being unrealistic. There's no way to handle that kind of load all at once.
1. Re:Siri on other iDevices by peragrin · 2012-01-29 14:14 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  How many servers? How much bandwidth?
  Not even WOW was originally released every where at the same time to adjust to load.
  The fact is until you get hard numbers you can't take it for granted exactly how much you need.
  Apple added 37 million 4S users in the last quarter. did you know in October how many iphones they would sell?
  
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2. Re:Siri on other iDevices by zippthorne · 2012-01-29 17:23 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  The real question is.. why do they need *any* servers to enable siri? iPhone 4S ought to be more than capable of handling a huge vocabulary on it's own power. I mean, I had a flip-phone in 2003 that could do voice-dialing from the phonebook without training, surely a smartphone should be capable of far, far, more without calling home for help...
  
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Not a real competitor to Siri by A12m0v · 2012-01-29 14:06 · Score: 1, Insightful

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.

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1. Re:Not a real competitor to Siri by Nerdfest · 2012-01-29 14:16 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Why do you consider that a good thing? Are you a big Internet Explorer fan? I'd much rather have functionality independently selectable so that I can choose which I want, and upgrade it (or not) as I choose.
Um...hello Watson, could you come here... by joshamania · 2012-01-29 15:14 · Score: 2, Insightful

I really don't understand why folks are making a big stink about Siri and this other whoozitwhatsits. I imagine IBM hasn't made a smartphone app for Watson because it would need a huge computer/serverfarm/planet to run it for millions of users yet.
Watson is the real deal. Siri, to me, seems like a search engine and nothing more. It's not answering questions...it's just giving normal people the ability to use Google like I use google...i.e. knowing the modifiers and using them.
Re:SpeakToIt Assistant by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-29 16:19 · Score: 2, Insightful

I'd assume it just means that you use your voice to command the app to make the call, it asks if that's what you meant, and then you just tell the app yes. So it doesn't require you to make any confirmations outside of the app itself. Though I don't have it, so I could be wrong.
Re:Pricing seems wrong... by twistedcubic · 2012-01-29 17:34 · Score: 3, Insightful

They charge 99 cents for the iPhone because iPhone users are more likely to spend money. Siriously.
Apple's success by thegarbz · 2012-01-29 20:39 · Score: 4, Insightful

That's the key to Apple's success right there. It's all in the marketing. Take a feature that most people don't know they had (did google ever advertise voice services?) and make it the staple feature of the OS release. It for some reason makes the world salivate in awe.
A few notables are the iCloud, and Facetime. The latter really had me scratching my head given that my not-smart phone was capable of doing that 10 years ago and Apple's Facetime wasn't even compatible with standard video calling methods. But none the less for some completely unknown reason people seem to go mental over these features.
Re:Old news by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-30 00:26 · Score: 0, Insightful

You're using a blackberry. Your argument isirrewvay. Come back and comment when you have SMART PHONE.
Re:Old news by Xest · 2012-01-30 00:37 · Score: 3, Insightful

"I'm still not sure what Siri does that's particularly special"
It doesn't.
More telling is Googling for things Siri can't answer, for which there are thousands of results. When you start to see what it can't do you begin to realise that it's really little more than voice-to-text, passed over to a search engine, with a few key words and terms mapped to local applications like "weather", "calendar", "appointment" and so on.
Just like any other search engine out there, there are a lot of questions it really struggles with when posed in natural language form.