The VAR Guy

There is a list of competitors to Apple’s Siri that have evolved since Siri’s unveiling, but Evi particularly caught my eye, thanks to its near-Siri-like quality. Evi also caught the eye of the rest of Internet, which pretty much drove its servers into the ground. Oops. But what can we learn about how voice recognition assistants work? Here’s the scoop …

I picked up Evi from the iTunes store for 99 cents, which apparently goes to licensing fees used for the voice recognition technology, brought to you by Nuance Technology. That’s the very same Nuance Technology Apple (stealthily) implemented into iOS 5 on the iPhone 4S.

You can watch how Evi works in Nuance’s promo video. You won’t be surprised to find it works a lot like Siri and is integrated into website APIs. However, Evi allegedly performs better at answering more complicated or obscure questions with esoteric answers. Conversely, Siri is integrated with iOS, so it can send text messages and add calendar events. Evi, however, is limited to the app only. In some ways, they compliment each other.

Unfortunately, Evi’s request servers have been slammed since the overnight success of the application. As a result, I can’t get a single request completed by Evi. But, I am pleasantly surprised at how well the voice recognition works. Only the most obscure kind of questions are improperly turned into text. In fact, the success rate could be higher if this year’s New York winter hadn’t upped my nasal congestion.

The bigger takeaway from this is a deeper understanding of how many services we use that rely on cloud requests. It was revealed that Apple interprets audio requests from Siri on the fly, in real time, at Apple HQ, and then shoots the answer back down to the user. It seems Apple works this way not only to ensure a level of control (iPhone 4S only) but also reliability. Apple must have more than just storage at its North Carolina data center facilities if every iPhone from here on out will come with Siri.

Does that mean smaller players can’t join the voice recognition space? Maybe, maybe not. But right now, this kind of technology is still wet behind the ears, a fact even Apple admits. (In case you missed it, Siri is still in “beta.”) The good news is this kind of technology won’t be “exclusive” for long, and clearly it can be implemented with fewer resources than Apple has.

Finally, it’s clear the demand for voice recognition technology is high. What’s simpler than talking to your phone? Voice recognition devices could have the smallest learning curve of any new technology, and that  means good things for users. I give it five years before we start telling our Android-powered microwaves how long t0 cook.

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