Amazon Buys Evi App for $26M, Fueling Smartphone Rumors

While the idea of major websites boasting a branded smartphone isn't exactly a new one, it crops up every so often. This time around, it's Amazon that has people wondering if it’ll get a smartphone, and that wondering has been fueled by a recent purchase. Amazon has bought the Evi app for $26 million, according to reports, and considering what Evi does, it's got some people envisioning a future of hardware.

The Evi app was developed by True Knowledge, a British firm that reportedly had a university project with quite a bit of promise – a search engine that could work on natural language. While at the time this didn't seem like much, Siri's arrival on the scene proved to be that critical moment that made Evi truly shine.

After Siri arrived, True Knowledge took the opportunity to license voice recognition technology from Nuance – the guys behind popular speech-to-text program Dragon Naturally Speaking – and paired it with Evi.

Evi has one particular advantage over Siri, though, in that Evi will work not only on iPhones, but with Android devices as well, allowing it to function on the two largest mobile device environments around, instead of just one of the two largest.

That reportedly prompted a sale of Evi to Amazon, though requests for confirmation have gone mostly unanswered. Quite a bit of information stemming from U.K. Companies House, however, offers evidence to that conclusion.

What has really raised some eyebrows, though, is when the idea of Ivona is added on. Amazon purchased Ivona back in January, and the company offered a series of interactive voice response (IVR) systems commonly used to expedite call centers by offering incoming callers a series of choices to help intercept some common issues. Take IVR and add it to a natural language search engine and what may well emerge from such a combination is a serious competitor for Siri.

Armed with a serious Siri competitor, it's not hard to see where some might think it's a good time for Amazon to bring out at smartphone all its own.

But the interesting thing about this is that it really doesn't need to come with hardware. It can be built into Amazon's systems, allowing users to shop by voice. It could be released as a standalone system for PCs and laptops and the like. Of course, it could come with a smartphone, but it wouldn't need to; after all, Amazon already has branded hardware in the Kindle and Kindle Fire tablet. But a Kindle smartphone may not be a bad idea; a Kindle reader with calling capabilities of sufficient size to be slipped into a pants pocket would probably go over well, as long as the text could be read.

Only time will tell what Amazon does with Evi, but this all may well prove to be the start of something very big indeed. A new phone? New additions to old devices? A shoring up of the already impressive Amazon system itself? Possibilities abound, and seeing just which comes up should be a treat in its own right.