For those day have upgraded to the iPhone 4 last year may not see the need to drop the cash on yet another upgrade to the 4S. Consequently, Siri functionality is something thats only lurking in the very distant future. Or so it seems. Until now.

Evi is a Siri-like application available on the App Store and can be currently found in the Top 25 Paid section on the App Store. Though I suspect it won’t stay there too much longer. To summarize very briefly, Evi is not Siri. And likely will never come close. But it does work, despite the App Store reviews that claim it doesn’t. Needless to say, more often then not, it will throw a “I’m having trouble getting a response from my servers. You might want to try again in a minute.” response at you, to which the proper reply would be, “Try harder then.” Occasionally, what will happen though, is that response will miraculously change into an actual answer to your question with relatively decent accuracy when typed. Forget speaking to it, because that is plain hopeless. Of course you’re probably wondering what the point of the application is if voice recognition is useless, after all, you can just type the question into Google with virtually instantaneous and frighteningly accurate answers. And for the most part you’re right, you might as well go with the Google app that also includes voice dictation.

If you did however decide to waste the $0.99 on Evi, you might as well enjoy it as much as possible and patiently wait and hope that an update will fix some of the issues. I think the trick here is practicing your patience and giving an app adequate time to communicate with the servers several dozen times before an answer is found. On the bright side, you will be a more patient individual with the help of Evi. For some evidence that this app does occasionally work, here is an actual screenshot of some of the questions I asked.

Check out Evi for iPhone on the App Store!