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.
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.
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.
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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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 28.9 ms ] threadMy 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.
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.