Slashdot Mirror
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.
Not only has this been out for approaching a week, but it's also far from a competitor. It uses the standard voice services to transcribe what you say, then 'helpfully' google it for you or open a webpage. It most certainly can't do what Siri does, even when it is (rarely) working. You can ask Siri where to get a sandwich. Asking Evi just results in the homepage for UrbanSpoon.com launching. Not even a search for what you want. When's that Majel thing coming?
Maybe so but look at the permissions that SpeakToIt Assistant requires. It's a bit scary:
THIS APPLICATION HAS ACCESS TO THE FOLLOWING:
SERVICES THAT COST YOU MONEY
DIRECTLY CALL PHONE NUMBERS
Allows the application to call phone numbers without your intervention. Malicious applications may cause unexpected calls on your phone bill. Note that this does not allow the application to call emergency numbers.
SEND SMS MESSAGES
Allows application to send SMS messages. Malicious applications may cost you money by sending messages without your confirmation.
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.
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.
Yes, scary, but isn't that expected? Isn't one of the features of Siri calling and texting people for you?
I'm thinking "Gay Deceiver" would be quite sultry and appealing.
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.
Iris already exists: Iris for Android
Get your free Dropbox account with 2 GB Free storage!
Microsoft will kill Iris with their own sentient copycat, "Zero". Then Zero will get stricken by melancholy and drown out its sorrows by searching on Bing.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
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.
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.
DIRECTLY CALL PHONE NUMBERS
1. Purchase pay-to-call and pay-to-sms services
2. Stand on street corner with megaphone yelling out instructions for phones to dial and message my numbers
3. Profit!
In fact you could just buy ads during popular TV shows that clearly speak the same instructions...
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.
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.
If you give permission to text or call to an app, you don't get to choose to let it do so only when you mean it. Android phones don't come with fMRI or MEG to know your intentions.
Yet.
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.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Speech Recognition is good. Many questions bumped back with server busy message - difference being it promises to respond when it is able to.
- Call X: Server busy - Thought this is something it can fetch from phone more than from its server.
- Email X: I do not know how to that yet. Ask me for any information.
- Calendar: Online calendars are Google Calendar, Yahoo! Calendar, O2 Calendar. (Those are hyperlinked words which would take you to another Evi Screen with Visit buttons.)
- Distance to Moon: May be you want something about the moon? Try this webpage Moon - Wikipedia. (Hyperlinked to Moon wiki page).
- Stock price of Apple: Try Quote.com for stock
- Height of Everest: Mount Everest's' elevation is 8850 meters, 29000 feet.
- The long sorry message read out is not you would want to hear more than a couple of times in the that unattractive robotic tone.
- It apparently depends on or uses a Text To Service other than the default one. And so the I selected (Pico TTS) is stopping if I am silent for more than 10s with out any audible warning. Which forces me to look whats happening and click on the listen button again.
- One issue that arises with a non-inbuilt TTS is Evi is not in control of the entire end to end experience and can be messed up pretty easily due to the TTSs' clicks, timeouts, quality, capabilities.
"Note: This application will make phone calls and send SMS messages to premium phone numbers. This will cause your phone bill to skyrocket and will give us millions of dollars of extra revenue."
I believe that app is called "teenager"...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
If they wanted to rack up charges on your phone bill by making unauthorized calls and text's, it's not like they'd put that in the terms of use.
That app is so invasive that it even managed to usurp your Slashdot account while you were typing and slip a completely superfluous, meaningless apostrophe into your use of the word "texts." These new apps are really insidious.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
They charge 99 cents for the iPhone because iPhone users are more likely to spend money. Siriously.
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.
"Hold your phone to the screen and play the Youtube video to install our great new anti-virus app..."
... and by "minor app developer" you mean a Stanford Research Institute spinoff, where it was created from over 10 years of AI research by DARPA on the CALO/PAL projects, which were in fact the largest AI projects in history?
You might remember DARPA from some of their other projects. Like ARPANET amongst others.
If you expect to equal 10 years of DARPA AI research and development in a 3-week coding project, well good luck with that.