Amazon has apparently acquired a Siri-like app called Evi in a deal worth some $26 million, TechCrunch has revealed. The acquisition is far from being official and we still wait for the press release issued by any of the two parties. That, however, hasn’t stopped the online retail giant from replacing Evi’s directors with its own legal representative in the UK.
Evi, in case you wonder, was developed by True Knowledge, a British startup with a natural language search engine developed in university labs. They’ve licensed Nuance’s voice recognition technology to make the Evi app, which is available for iOS and Android devices.
And once again, the Amazon smartphone rumors are back, suggesting that Evi’s technology will take a central stage at Amazon’s upcoming handset to make it somehow different from the rest of the pack. Amazon did a good job to differentiate its Kindle Fire from other Android tablets and we’ll see whether they’ll be able to accomplish the same thing with a smartphone…