Who needs Apple's Siri? We have Ziggy for Windows Phone. [Video]

If there was an over-hyped engineering science in tardily 2022 it was perchance Apple tree's Siri,their voice recognition/information application for the iPhone 4s. At present we'll admit that Siri is quite a strong slice of tech one that nosotros wish Windows Telephone had built-in in improver to our Bing Vocalism service, but the marketing automobile backside Siri was a tad overwhelming. And then again, in that location'due south no denying facts: Bing Voice while businesslike for certain tasks is yet behind Apple's Siri in some ways.

Nonetheless, developer Shai Leib has given u.s.a. Windows Phone users an pick: Ask Ziggy . The new app is a free, ad-gratis and as far as we can tell, completely unique. Nosotros spoke with Leib about his project and how it works:

"Ask Ziggy uses Oral communication Recognition to interpret human speech into transcribed text, which is displayed in a speech bubble. The transcribed text is analyzed for patterns to detect commands or general queries. Commands are interpreted and routed to routine telephone tasks such as emailing, texting, calling, social network updates, and getting directions.

When a general question is asked, a mixture of brew upwards technologies and web scraping is employed to search the web for relevant responses. Pattern matching is used to summarize a directly reply from a web page. Several passes may be required to find a concise answer. A direct answer is so spoken out loud, and displayed in a speech communication bubble. When a direct reply cannot be summarized the user is prompted by speech to click on their search bubble to meet web search results based on their spoken query."

Ask Ziggy

That'southward some pretty impressive work for a unmarried developer if yous ask us. The actual voice-recognition software is based on Nuance but the data fetching and matching are all his doing. And it works. That'due south one affair nosotros desire to stress here, we didn't find this app gimmicky at all but instead quite useful for mathematical questions, random trivia, posting to our Twitter/Facebook/Alive, getting directions, flight status and more. Having the phone read back to you the respond in a clean, minimalist setting makes information technology feel smart. Heck, it even got our Monty Python question correct (see YouTube video).

The version y'all see in the video is heading to the Marketplace every bit we speak but you can grab the slightly older version right at present. Give it a go--it'due south costless, useful and really quite an boggling app. Leib also has a lot of plans to further refine and enhance the experience including expanded speech grammar, multi-linguistic communication support and even language translations. Check out the Enquire Ziggy website here for more info.

QR: Ask Ziggy

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