

TrueKnowledge's answer to Siri, Evi, Arrives - togasystems
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2012/01/23/evi-arrives-in-town-to-go-toe-to-toe-with-siri/

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extension
I think I need an artificial intelligence to think up questions to ask
artificial intelligences, because I can never come up with any that it
understands and can't be trivially answered by a web search or common sense.

These things might be useful when you can actually have a conversation with
them, and they can dialectically guide you to complex answers. When you ask an
unambiguous question that can be answered immediately, you've already done all
the work that requires intelligence.

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extension
So far, every answer this thing has given me is a link to the top result on
Bing. Are they doing that to reduce load on the servers? If so, that is a
really dumb move. Everyone who tries it now is going to think that's all it
does.

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chimeracoder
The servers seem a bit slow (probably overloaded), but I was able to get
responses to everything in the end. In the end, it was pretty good, though not
perfect (about what I've seen from Siri, except that Evi doesn't currently
support integration with actions on other applications - though since Android
seems to support this nicely, I imagine it'll be a nice addition once they add
it).

My main problem with Evi is the same as the problem I have with Siri - I don't
really see a need for it. It's kind of cool at first to have a computer listen
to my voice and tell me what I want, but it's only marginally faster than
typing it out myself (and not necessarily as accurate).

On a related note, natural-language processing may be useful in this context
for people who aren't very tech-savvy, but after years of using less
intelligent search engines, I've mentally trained myself _not_ to use complete
sentences in web search. For example:

'When does the nearest Duane Reade close?'

vs.

'Duane Reade hours 10036'.

The former might be more natural for the average person, but I knew without
even testing those out that the latter would be more likely to give me the
what I was looking for. (The same applies to the less-natural 'When does Duane
Reade close 10036?'

The latter is faster to type, and if you're used to using search engines
frequently, it's actually a lot more 'natural' than the first one, despite not
being a complete sentence. So for me, the appeal of interacting with a human-
like computer is outweighed by the annoyance of having to think like I'm
talking to a human, not a computer.

That's not to discredit all the hard work that went into these - this is
essentially the first generation, and I think a lot of great stuff can be
built off of these tools. But at the time being, I can't imagine using Evi or
Siri in daily life.

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amwelles
Learning to search is a great skill. People are often confused about how I
self-taught myself enough coding and design to land a job without a college
degree pretty much right out of high school. It's all about knowing how to
search and find the answers that you need. Makes me wonder whether or not
they'll start teaching that in schools someday alongside programming, which
seems like it will likely be taught at the high school (or perhaps even
elementary) level someday.

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Urgo
Installed it (on android).. but it looks like their servers are swamped. I
haven't been able to get it to answer anything yet.

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Sandman
Will Apple allow this on the iPhone, since it copies existing functionality?

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Mordor
Sili would have been a better name :p

