The rival to Apple's voice activated personal assistant, Siri, is proving so popular that the outfit's servers keep crashing.

Evi has appeared on both the iPhone and the Android and since then it has been experiencing a few problems caused by unexpectly heavy traffic. The servers that all of Evi's questions are routed through have been overloaded to the point that users are beginning to be more than a little annoyed.

It is not clear if people are bored of the Siri or the huge numbers Android users want some similar functionality. We personally would like it if Apple users were fed up with being given information approved by the Christian Right. Siri does all sorts of odd things such refer them to “pro-life” groups when they want to find an abortion clinic. There are a few voice activated search apps out there, and Apple has always insisted that Siri was only in beta. At the moment it seems that Evi, which was a free app on the Android store, is fast becoming the first choice of alternatives.

Visitors hitting the servers are reporting that they are having to wait a long time for replies. Part of the problem is that the software's voice software is not particularly well integrated with the True Knowledge database yet. However generally the Evi is seen as being better informed and, when it works, better at getting the data too you.

While we expect them to sort out the traffic problems in a few days and future versions of the software will be better. Still it is free at the moment so users have little they can moan about.