And now Evi up against the Siri by Apple

And now Evi up against the Siri by Apple

I have to confess this review I found in The Observer (26 Feb 2012) is pretty much a mystery to me. That’s one good reason, I find from experience, to write about it. Somebody is sure to enlighten me. I write, after all, not as an expert by as what I call an expert through experience, which means most of the time not an expert at all, but feeling my way forward in this extremely confusing and often baffling new world of devices, techniques and means, which I can’t help but find exciting.

So, here is the helper to the talking mobile phone which is able to understand different English accents. Unbelievable. How close is that to anything I’ve ever known and how close is it to my world of writing?

Well, the existing Siri produced by Apple already appears to be a talking device and now this new Evi, created somewhere in or around Cambridge – which I gather is absolutely brimming with these small companies eager to innovate and change the world – can search for the geography of where a particular business is located and then can match to a regional or local accent. How amazing is that! According to the founder of True Knowledge, William Tunstall-Pedoe who created the company, Evi is capable of holding millions of simultaneous conversations and is actually self-aware. In contrast, he maintains, Siri simply relies on other services knowing things. Evi knows the answer and the user can follow up with further questions. Evi works out new facts by drawing on what it already has in its knowledge and also can reason, which means for instance that it can use satellite information to figure out wider and contextual information.

Let’s give Evi and its creator Tunstall-Pedoe full credit. After all, he has already created that software item that is able to solve cryptic crossword clues. Apparently, this was used by Dan Brown to generate the anagrams in his best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code. That’s enough for me. I know which of these two – Evi and Siri – I find more intriguing and impressive.