Internet answer engine
Next time you need to find out what time it is in Chicago, or the number of your nearest pizza restaurant, smartphone app Evi will have the answer. Cambridge-based True Knowledge have spent years developing their ‘internet answer engine’ which gives you the answers to the questions you ask, in a format you can access easily on your smartphone. A rival to Apple’s Siri, but unlike Siri, Evi is getting good reviews for her localised knowledge and is among the top app downloads.

True Knowledge’s CEO, William Tunstall-Pedoe, was inspired by thinking about what the perfect search engine would be like. He believes that in the future, people will want to get information by simply asking for it naturally, and have the information spoken or represented back directly.

How Evi understands
What is new about Evi, Tunstall-Pedoe explains, ‘is that we’ve invented the technology that allows us to represent knowledge in a form that the computer can process and reason with, using hundreds of millions of facts, common sense and lexical knowledge. Another big component is how you turn understanding into a representation of what the user means and is trying to achieve, and how you can use inferred knowledge; combining facts to create new facts.’  So if the question is: ‘what time is it in Chicago?’ there’s a fact that Chicago is located in Illinois, that Illinois is in a central time region, and so on. Those facts are combined to reason what the time currently is in Chicago.

A new model for mobiles
Tunstall-Pedoe believes this approach is very relevant for mobile phones and speech. ‘Your phone has a small screen, you can’t really spend your time browsing large numbers of links. If the experience is asking your mobile a question and having it speak the answer back, the answer has to be short as well. You can’t have the phone read back an entire page of text, where in fact the answer isn’t on the page. The computer needs to be able to generate a concise and direct answer. This isn’t possible with traditional keyword searching methods.’

Now Evi has successfully launched, Tunstall-Pedoe is excited by the future, ‘we are in a new stage, with heads down, focussed on making Evi even better.’