I have a few iFriends out there. And many of them gushed over the 4S and iPad 2 as we all did over the GNexus (sometimes it’s splitting hairs over who’s the bigger fanboys).
Well, when the 4S came out they loved showing off Siri.
I’ll admit I was kind of impressed at first. Despite how I’d always counter with Voice Actions. But it was neat when they could ask Siri questions and she/he might answer, whereas we just had Google results.
Well, recently an app has come about that is similar to Siri… is it Android’s answer?
Welcome Evi
No… no it’s not. But it’s neat.
Like Siri you can ask it questions and it’ll use some nifty background data to find some results for you. And, can even speak it if you like that TTS voice (not me).
But the big problem, like Siri, is not the voice recognition, but the back end data connection. More than half the tries I had with Evi it couldn’t connect. Then again, it’s new, people heard lots about Siri, and that Evi is ‘our Siri’, so it’s probably being overwhelmed.
Anyways, it’s a nifty thing. I’ve tried several queries, like the typical “how much is 1 teaspoon” or I liked my “tell me a joke”.
So it’s good at answering some simple questions, and using some of your phone information try to tailor the answer to you.
It does have it’s funny translation moments. I can expect some new ‘fail blog’ for auto-translates coming soon.
What it can’t do is stuff that the Voice Actions can do (i.e. “text Fred; you’re fired”), which are action based, these are more query based.
But… it’s kinda neat. I liked having it translate an Italian saying the other day during a co-worker get together, much easier that doing a Voice Action query and getting a Google result, or opening up Translate, making sure I had it in Italian -> English, etc…
All in all – go get it. It’s a nice novel little feature, and it’s brand spanking new, so it’ll keep getting better.
