Evi is a new search application for Android and iOS that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language technology to query the web and deliver answers to your questions.

Although similar to Apple's Siri, Evi is purely focused on web search, rather than being fully integrated into the phone's operating system. Therefore, you cannot ask Evi to send a text message or add a calendar event, as you can with Siri. When Evi was launched by it's makers, True Knowledge, it met with an unexpected amount of popularity and consequently their servers were swamped. For much of the first couple of days the only answer Evi gave was "My servers are very slow in responding". However, the people behind the scenes are working hard to update their infrastructure and hopefully Evi will become more stable as time goes on. Oh, and it does seems to hammer your battery life.

Evi is up:

Evi is down:

When Evi is up and running, it (or she..?) works well. You can either type or talk your questions and the voice recognition is very good, if sometimes a little random, and answers are generally useful. She, I think we'll call Evi 'she' from now on, understands the context of your question, which is quite different from a dumb string of words pumped into a text box, the way most of us currently interact with search engines. For example, asking a traditional search engine "Where can I get a taxi " will results in a list of webpages based on that search string. Evi, however, will respond with a coherent paragraph with details of taxi firms near to you. Asking something specific, like "who was the Beatle's first drummer", will give you the actual answer, rather than a link to a webpage with the answer. If you want, Evi will read out the answer to you. The ultimate goal is for the whole experience to feel like asking a real person the same question. If Evi cannot find a complete answer to your question, she will suggest some web links. Links are also added to answers that may require further information and those that Evi suggests seem to be relevant.

Evi answers:

Evi answers and suggests links:

Evi answers and suggests places to look further:

I found that it can very quickly become quite natural to speak or type a question and expect a direct answer, rather than a page of links as you get with a traditional search engine. Also, Evi supports conversational search, so you can ask about something and then add a follow up question without being specific about the subject again.

Conversational search:

The perils of voice recognition. Err.. no Evi, that is not what I said:

Evi's artificial intelligence:

It has been a long time coming, but with Siri and Evi we are taking the first faltering baby steps towards mainstream adoption of artificial intelligence. The real power of this technology is in making sense of the information out there on the web and presenting a new way to interface with it. In the near future scrolling through a Google search results page may seem as quaint as sending a telegram does now. Artificial intelligence will sift through those thousands of web links we get for each search term and talk to us with a coherent answer to our question. Of course, just as with the web and search today, who defines how all the information out there is processed, filtered and presented by artificial intelligence and who creates and controls that AI will become a big question. For now, Evi and her like are passive servants, but if their masters had an agenda, if they phrased answers in subtly coloured ways, then they could have a lot of power and influence.