After three months of negotiating, tweaking and pushing Apple, they finally have their Siri-alternative out onto the market. Like Siri, it is based on data from Wolfram Alpha, among other sources, and allows you to ask questions with voice or by typing. Unfortunately, as seen with Evi on iPhone, many of these voice apps get approved and later pulled for being too similar to SIRI. Will Voice Answer be able to avoid a similar fate?

If Siri actually supported older versions of the iPhone, I’d understand their move to limit voice assistants a little better. As it is though? It’s not like anyone with an iPhone 4S will be downloading this. If they do, it will be the minority of 4S owners, I’d wager.

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While it is hard to find a voice assistant even close to being as stable and capable as Siri, there is one app that actually comes pretty close, and that’s True Knowledge’s Evi. While the device has been known for having server connection problems here and there, I can attest to the fact that at least the Android version is very good, when I can get it to connect the server properly.

Unfortunately, it looks like the app will no longer be available on iOS, instead becoming an Android only option. No, this isn’t a choice that True Knowledge made on their own, instead one that is being enforced by Apple.

According to William Tunstall-Pedoe, the chief executive of True Knowledge, they were contacted by an Apple representative on Friday and were told that a decision had been made that the app would be removed. The reason? According to Apple it is because they are reviewing it under condition 8.3 of the App Store’s terms and conditions, which basically states that if an app appears to be confusingly similar to an existing Apple product they can ban it from the store.

While they do have quite a few similarities such as naming and even features, they also have some pretty noticeable differences, like Evi’s apparently more robust ability to handle various accents, something that iPhone’s SIRI seems to have trouble with.

Evi has barely even reached the one-month-old mark and yet it has managed to reach about half a million downloads, which are rather evenly split between iOS and Android users. While this might not be that big of a deal for 4S owners, it might be disappointing for those who own older versions of the iPhone or iPad that used Evi as a very capable substitute.

For now, the app is still available in iOS, but it is unclear how much longer it will be before the company decides to take it down. So if you’ve considered Evi on your iOS device before, now might be a great time to get it before it’s too late.

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The post Apple Plans To Pull Siri Competitor, Evi, From The App Store appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

It looks like Siri now has a sister. A sister that is smarter, faster, and more resourceful. A sister that is more social too, playing friendly with both Android and iOS people. The sister’s name is Evi and this cross-platform voice assistant looks to be a serious challenger to Siri.

To be fair, there are other voice-based search assistants out there, but Evi by True Knowledge looks like it holds some seriously powerful potential. They say that the Evi app has “almost a billion facts,” as well as the ability to “infer trillions” from that. Evi also looks all around the web for you, gathering information from Google, GPS, Yelp, Wolfram Alpha, and more. There’s also the voting up and down of answers to help improve Evi’s effectiveness. Not surprisingly, Nuance is the tech behind the voice recognition.

Evi appears to have stronger logic and language reasoning too.

“If you ask “Who was President when Queen Elizabeth II was born?” Evi determines who Queen Elizabeth II is, when she was born and then compares this against which U.S. presidents were in office over that time, delivering the results of both serving U.S. presidents during those years. Siri cannot do this.”

And Evi can provide localized information for UK users, something that Siri still cannot do. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it looks like the True Knowledge servers have been overloaded by the flood of new users, so it doesn’t seem to be working. In any case, the iPhone version is available in the App Store for 99 cents, whereas the Android version is a free download.

The post Siri Meet Evi, The Voice Assistant For Android And iOS appeared first on Mobile Magazine.