Apple Threatens To Pull Siri Clone From App Store

Posted by Unknown on Monday February 27, 2012 @08:16PM from the larry-wall-is-full-of-lies dept.

daria42 writes "Steve Jobs might not be around any more to enforce some of Apple's stricter policies, but that doesn't mean the company is letting it all hang loose. Overnight the U.K. company which produces a speech recognition app called Evi, which mimics many of the functions of Apple's Siri, confirmed Apple had approached his company letting it know that Evi was being reviewed for possible breaches of Apple's App Store policies. The reason? A clause in the policy which bans apps too similar to Apple's existing software. It does appear to matter to Apple that Siri doesn't function that well in the U.K., because of a lack of good localisation." Supposedly Evi will be continue to be allowed on iOS if it alters its interface to be dissimilar enough from Siri to placate Apple.

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Re:Evi not much of a competitor, IMHO by thegarbz · 2012-02-27 20:45 · Score: 4, Interesting

I concur. While the text to speech engine and the interpreter seem to work correctly it suffers from a lack of information.
When I tried saying "What is the weather in Sydney" I got an answer saying that the functionality is coming soon and to try Accuweather instead. Why not just pipe that request to Google and return the text at the top?
Other classic ones are maths problems. I asked "What is five plus five." It correctly interpreted "5+5?" and then said "This appears to be a maths question, try asking the question in words."
I eventually beat it by asking "What is the addition of 5 and 5?" and it correctly answered 10.
Seriously the program has some incredibly fundamental flaws.