IVR

Evi, a $0.99 iPhone (News - Alert) app, is a sort-of Siri clone designed for people who don’t have the iPhone 4S and want a Siri-like voice control experience. Evi is strictly an information gatherer, grabbing users information from the Internet or providing links as answer to questions you ask. The questions can either be spoken to Evi or manually typed.

“The idea behind Evi is that asking naturally for information and getting a concise response back from a friendly system is a better user experience than guessing keywords and browsing links,” said company founder and CEO William Tunstall-Pedoe.

Evi is powered by Nuance Communications’ technology, which is reported to be the very same technology behind the ever-so-famous Siri application on the iPhone. Taking speech and turning it into text is tough, so is natural language text and understanding what the user means. Evi knows almost a billion ‘facts’ and integrates with a lot of other applications to help provide answers to users questions.

For example, if you searched for the best hamburgers in your local town on Google (News - Alert), you will receive a list of results that match that terminology. However, if you were to ask Evi the same question, instead of a list of results, Evi will provide either information about the best restaurant closest to you or will use an integrated app such as Urban Spoon to give you the best hamburgers nearby. This is ideal because not only do those apps offer reviews, but they sometimes also have the prices and menus available, which would give you much more information than a typical search engine would.

The more you ask Evi, the more information it will be able to provide. Tunstall-Pedoe has big plans for the app as it continues to develop and be downloaded by users. “Evi has potential to work on a variety of platforms, from electronics to automobiles,” said Tunstall-Pedoe.

Evi is available on the iPhone from iTunes and an Android (News - Alert) app is available in Beta form. Given that Siri is just not very good at giving answers which aren’t about the United States, Evi might really give Siri a run for it’s money. This app also might become the new Siri for the rest of the world, especially since Evi will run on any Android or iPhone and not just the iPhone 4S.