2011 was one year which saw the release of many new faces in the mobile world. The release of Ice Cream Sandwich on Android and the launch of Windows Phone were the highlights of 2011. The year also saw great innovation in the mobile software field. One such software innovation released in the second half of 2011 was Apple’s Siri. Launched along with the iPhone 4S, this application has become the most famous voice recognition application in the mobile sphere. With the entry of Windows Phone in the market, the competition is certainly expected to spur companies to come up with better software.
Even though Siri has competition in the form of Bing Voice, it still remains the preferred choice among voice recognition apps for a majority of users around the world. However, there is a new face in the Windows Phone market which is expected to give Apple’s Siri a run for its money, called Ask Ziggy. The biggest surprise is that the app has been designed by a single developer. Shai Leib (the developer) described Ask Ziggy as an application which uses speech recognition to convert the speech into text.
The application analyzes, interprets and detects patterns in order to find the best matching answer to a query through a process involving a number of algorithms and web searches. Once the required answer is obtained, it is then spoken out and displayed on the screen by the application. For a single developer to have designed such a complex app deserves a lot of credit. The developer has used voice recognition algorithms from Nuance, though data matching and fetching is was developed by Shai Leib himself.
The app has already proved to be very useful to users for getting directions, flight status, basic mathematics and much more. Though Ask Ziggy has been available for a while on the Market, the latest version comes with a number of improvements which have really caught the eye of many users. The developer has also released plans of enhancing the software’s grammar and refining the search patterns that the app currently uses. Ask Ziggy isn’t the most refined software in the market, but it certainly has the potential to offer a viable alternative to Siri outside the Apple ecosystem. Here’s to hoping the developer gets more support and manages to come up with something rivalling Siri very soon!
