Ask Ziggy, the company behind a speech recognition-enabled personal mobile assistant that we likened to ‘the broke man’s Siri for Windows Phone’ when it launched for WP7, has raised $5 million in funding.
Ask Ziggy says it is working closely with Nuance Communications to develop an advanced ‘Natural Speech’ search engine and personal voice assistance service for mobile devices. The company clams it has already processed over 3 million voice searches since its inception this year.
That’s amazing, considering the product is vastly underwhelming in our opinion.
The company says it will use the fresh cash, which comes from an unnamed “publicly traded multinational corporation”, to create and distribute mobile apps for “nearly all” Apple, Android and Microsoft products, including tablets – by Q3 2012 no less.
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Maybe they’ll go crazy and also create a company website, who knows.
Comments Ask Ziggy CEO Shai Leib:
“Although we’ve had prior key investments via Sunbelt Technologies Management LLC, when major publicly traded multinational companies begin to recognize the value of Ask Ziggy’s Cloud-based contextual search solutions, as was the case with this strategic investment, we have to celebrate.
Ask Ziggy’s Natural Speech search engine empowers and expands the user experience and convenience for all mobile devices, not merely cell phones. Speaking directly into a device and getting a voice reply, with zero typing required, is here at last.
This funding will now enable Ask Ziggy to deliver multi-language, accent independent, Natural Speech Personal Assistant Apps running on all devices, including cellular handsets, tablets and even computing headsets, which will immediately change our world.”
In addition, Ask Ziggy announced that its Software Development Kit will be available shortly and that its first client will be, and I quote, “the world’s first multi-billion dollar multinational corporation to use a Personal Assistant voice SDK for international transactions”.
Okay, now we’re really curious.
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