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Meet Ziggy, Siri’s Cousin for Windows Phone

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Those who spend a lot of time behind the wheel of a car and want to multitask away on their phone while driving may look on to Siri with envy if they don’t already own an iPhone 4S. Thankfully, third-party developers for Windows Phone 7 have come up with a solution for Microsoft’s mobile platform in the form of Ask Ziggy, a voice-based personal assistant application that is similar in functionality to Apple’s native Siri.

Ask Ziggy is available free of charge in Microsoft’s Marketplace right now, and is ad-free.

According to the developers of Ask Ziggy, who have spoken with WP Central regarding the app, this is how Siri’s competition will work on your Windows Phone handset:

Ask Ziggy uses Speech Recognition to translate 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 phone tasks such as emailing, texting, calling, social network updates, and getting directions.

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

Unfortunately, though, you’ll still have to maneuver to the app itself using your phone’s touchscreen, unlike Siri, which can be activated with the hardware home button.

I tried Ask Ziggy on the Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone and the app performs as expected. It’s still not as elegant or simple as Siri and does require some screen taps to see web search results.

3 Comments

3 Comments

  1. Guest

    01/02/2012 at 10:12 pm

    What’s up with the built-in speech recoginition software in WP7? That has a similar functionality, hasn’t it? Too bad it’s only in english, I can’t write text messages in my language in it; but otherwise it works perfectly.

  2. buzzzqwert

    01/03/2012 at 8:53 am

    When I asked it “what time is it?” it gave me the time in Alabama, I live in New York so I was more specific. I asked what time is it in New York and at 11:45AM it stated it was 8:51AM on June 6, 2009. Maybe the update will be a bit more accurate or maybe the question was too basic.     

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