A recent addition up in the Windows Marketplace, and picked up in the last twenty four hours by almost every Windows Phone site as "an alternative to Apple's Siri", Ask Ziggy is a voice powered search engine interface for your smartphone. Programmed by a single developer, Shai Leib, it ties in a number of services to present a credible, albeit first generation, voice interface for Windows Phone.

What we do know is that an online connection is needed to process any voice queries, and these are passed through Nuance. After that, Leib's code takes over to parse the resulting text query, passing it through various search engines, before delivering an answer back to your handset, which is both printed on the screen and read out to you.

And it does work, with as much accuracy in the answers as you would get it you typed the query into Bing, Google, Ask.com, or similar search engines. What it doesn't have is a huge database of smart and witty answers to questions like "Does Ziggy play guitar?", although there are some in there, notably based around Monty Python. Arguably it was the wit of Siri that made it a hit, rather than the interface to a number of search engines.

But for a one-man operation, Leib has managed to pull together something that's going to be a great calling card, which has a number of uses, and which now has a lot of people using the service. Whether Ziggy is updated, or Leib is hired by a mobile development firm, or something else, remains to be seen.