Evi – an intelligent personal assistant, only without the intelligent bit

Ever since Apple released the awesome Siri with the iPhone4S others have been scrambling to catch up. Microsoft had a go, Android developers tried their luck and various other existing iPhone devs pimped their talk-and-respond apps. But they were all, for the most part, shite – pale imitations that didn’t even come close to Siri’s accuracy, flexiblity and fact-finding capabilities.

The latest app to step in the ring with Siri and try its luck is Evi. I’d read good reviews of this app elsewhere and despite the huge number of one star reviews in the app store, I paid my dollar and downloaded it. First impressions were good, it sports a similarly simple interface to Siri and has a great layout with cool off-whites and dark grey dialog boxes.

So first I asked Evi what the current temperature was. I’d already given the app permission to access my phone’s location and thought it might check the weather and report back with a figure. Instead Evi suggested, “The web page might be useful for that Intellicast – Current Temperatures in United States“. Ermm great, firstly I’m in Australia, secondly I’d have liked an actual figure, not a link to a website.

Then I try one of the examples that the developers actually list when you first start the app. I asked, “Pubs near here”. Despite the fact that there are two pubs in my town, it couldn’t find them and suggested I check Yelp for results in a town 20km from here. Awesome. Since it had at least identified a town near here, I figured I’d find out what films were on there and the best Evi can do is a link to a film previews website. Rapidly losing the will to live, I asked Evi, “What films did Robert De Niro star in?” Evi did at least recognise the name Robert De Niro, but instead of serving up some useful information, gives me a link to De Niro’s entry in Wikipedia. Not very helpful.

Finally Evi gave up completely. Any search requests you try now are greeted with an apology from the developers that suggests that they massively underestimated the demand that would be placed on their question-and-response servers. Which isn’t really good enough. I hope they work the bugs out, but at the moment Evi’s about as much use as a chocolate teapot.