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August 15, 2012

Ask Ziggy's Cloud-Based Speech Recognition Receives $5 Million in Funding

By David Gitonga
TMCnet Contributing Writer

Ask Ziggy’s recent expansion of its strategic partners list and a $5 million funding from a publicly traded multinational corporation has been seen as a milestone in the company’s rapid growth.

 Ask Ziggy, a pioneer in voice recognition technology and personal voice assistant that incorporates artificial intelligence for Android, Apple (News - Alert) and Microsoft devices, has seen over three million voice searches within a year since its inception. This growth has attracted major companies to start recognizing the value of Ask Ziggy’s cloud-based contextual search solutions and provide key investments.

According to the CEO and visionary of Ask Ziggy, Shai Leib, “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.”

The CEO said that the new $5 million funding will enable Ask Ziggy to deliver multi-language, accent independent, Natural Speech Personal Assistant apps running on all devices which will immediately change the world.

According to a senior advisor to Mr. Leib, Jeffrey J. Jacobsen, who is also the Golden-i program manager for Kopin Corporation, “Combining Ziggy’s 22-language cloud-based Natural Speech search engine with Golden-i’s the world-class embedded real-time speech and gesture interface will rapidly transform ‘Siri’ class speech recognition from merely amusing into a fast, accurate, professional-grade access to information, and entirely ‘hands-Free’.”

 Mr. Jacobsen added that the challenge came when Golden-i’s 97 percent speech recognition accuracy’ convenience across multiple languages could not be extended in a cloud or the World Wide Web. Ask Ziggy’s artificial intelligence-assisted contextual speech recognition came to the rescue. Golden-i thus offers superior noise-cancelled speech recognition while Ask Ziggy plugs into its server resources to deliver a superior experience to users.

Ask Ziggy will make available its SDK shortly and have its first client as the first multi-billion dollar multinational corporation to use its personal assistant for voice SDK to execute international transactions.

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Edited by Brooke Neuman