Evi (formerly True Knowledge) is a technology company in

Cambridge, England Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge became ...

, founded by William Tunstall-Pedoe,MediaGuardian 100 2009
The Guardian (newspaper). 13 July 2009
Cambridge News (newspaper). 19 February 2012New Virtual Helper Challenges Siri
Technology Review (MIT). Rachel Metz. 27 January 2012 which specialises in

knowledge base A knowledge base (KB) is a technology used to store complex structured and unstructured information used by a computer system. The initial use of the term was in connection with expert systems, which were the first knowledge-based systems. ...

and semantic search engine software. Its first product was an

answer engine Question answering (QA) is a computer science discipline within the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP), which is concerned with building systems that automatically answer questions posed by humans in a natural ...

that aimed to directly answer questions on any subject posed in plain English text, which is accomplished using a

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...

of discrete facts.Cambridge AI specialist seeks funding for latest exciting venture
7 May 2007. True Knowledge. Retrieved 2 Dec. 2008Technology
True Knowledge. Retrieved 2 Dec. 2008 The True Knowledge Answer engine was launched for private beta testing and development on 7 November 2007. In January 2012 True Knowledge launched a major new product Evi (pronounced ''ee-vee''), an

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

program which can be communicated with using natural language via an app on iPhone and Android.Apple iPhone Siri, meet competitor Evi, from True Knowledge. Alternative to iPhone 4S.
''Global Post''. Richard Orange. 24 January 2012Hands-On: Evi App Brings Siri-Like Smarts to iOS and Android
24 January 2012. ''Wired''.Evi arrives in town to go toe-to-toe with Siri
23 Jan 2012. Techcrunch The company changed its name from True Knowledge to Evi in June 2012. In October 2012, Evi was acquired by

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technolog ...

and is now part of the Amazon group of companies.Why US tech giants are buying British AI start-ups
''CNBC'' 5 February 2016 Arjun Karpal The technology and team became a key part of

Amazon Alexa Amazon Alexa, also known simply as Alexa, is a virtual assistant technology largely based on a Polish speech synthesiser named Ivona, bought by Amazon in 2013. It was first used in the Amazon Echo smart speaker and the Echo Dot, Echo Studio ...

assistant (debuting with the

Amazon Echo Amazon Echo, often shortened to Echo, is an American brand of smart speakers developed by Amazon. Echo devices connect to the voice-controlled intelligent personal assistant service '' Alexa'', which will respond when a user says "Alexa". Users ...

).The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo
''Bloomberg'' 19 April 2016 Joshua Brustein.

Core technology premise

The True Knowledge Answer Engine attempts to comprehend posed questions by disambiguating from all possible meanings of the words in the question to find the most likely meaning of the question being asked. It does this by drawing upon its database of knowledge of discrete facts. As these facts are stored in a form that the computer can understand, the answer engine attempts to produce an answer to what it comprehends to be the question by logically deducing from them. For example, if one were to type in "What is the birth date of

George W. Bush George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. A member of the Republican Party, Bush family, and son of the 41st president George H. W. Bush, he ...

?", True Knowledge would reason from the facts "George W. Bush is a president", "George W. Bush is a human being", "A president is a subclass of human being", "Date of creation is a more general form for birth date", and "the 6th of July is the date of creation for George W. Bush", to produce the simple answer, "the 6th of July". True Knowledge differs from competitors like Freebase and

DBpedia DBpedia (from "DB" for " database") is a project aiming to extract structured content from the information created in the Wikipedia project. This structured information is made available on the World Wide Web. DBpedia allows users to semanti ...

in that they offer natural language access. Unlike the others however, users who post information to True Knowledge granted the company a "non-exclusive, irrevocable, perpetual licence to use such information to operate this website and for any other purposes".

Knowledge accumulation and verification

Evi gathers information for its database in two ways: importing it from "credible" external databases (which for them includes Wikipedia) and from user submission following a consistent format and detailed process for input. True Knowledge strives to monitor this user submitted knowledge in multiple ways. One method involves a system of checks and balances in some ways similar to

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

's, allowing users to modify or "agree"/"disagree" with information presented by True Knowledge. The system itself also assesses submitted information due to the fact that the information is submitted as discrete facts that computers can understand. The system is able to reject any facts that are semantically incompatible with other approved knowledge. On 21 November 2008, True Knowledge announced on its official blog that over 100,000 facts had been added by beta users and as of August 2010, the True Knowledge database overall contained 283,511,156 facts about 9,237,091 things. In November 2010, True Knowledge used some 300 million facts to calculate that Sunday, 11 April 1954, was the most boring day since 1900.

Financing

On 7 May 2007, True Knowledge Ltd. announced it would be "actively seeking investments following several years of internally-funded development". Then, on 17 September 2007, Octopus Ventures, a British

venture capitalist Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

firm, announced its investment of more than $1.2 million into True Knowledge, the first significant investment into the company, allowing it to further develop its website and achieve critical milestones towards bringing the True Knowledge Answer Engine to market. On 30 July 2008, True Knowledge announced it had raised another $4 million in a second round of funding from Octopus Ventures and other investors that would be used towards expanding its staff, developing new products, and moving towards a rollout within 12 months.True Knowledge API lies at the heart of real business model
ZDNet. 13 April 2009.

Evi app

Evi was launched to the public in January 2012 through the iTunes App Store and Android Marketplace (Now rebranded as

Google Play Google Play, also known as the Google Play Store and formerly the Android Market, is a digital distribution service operated and developed by Google. It serves as the official app store for certified devices running on the Android operating sy ...

). Evi is a

cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may ...

-based

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

(AI) which builds upon the core semantic search technology developed by the company and adds conversation, external

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

s, location sensitivity and other features.Evi
Evi Launch video by True Knowledge Users can talk to Evi via an iPhone and Android app. Voice is supported. The company calls this "conversational search". In May an update was released on both Android and iOS that introduced

voice control A voice-user interface (VUI) makes spoken human interaction with computers possible, using speech recognition to understand spoken commands and answer questions, and typically text to speech to play a reply. A voice command device is a device con ...

s for phone,

SMS Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text ...

, and

Email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

. This was announced as the first phase of phone control updates which will add further functionality and deeper integration with device features.

References

External links