SoundHound Inc. recently unveiled an absolutely powerful and crazy personal assistant to take on Apple's Siri and Google's Google Now and according to the video released by SoundHound featuring the capabilities of Hound, it looks pretty promising that very soon it will fulfill all its promises.The voice interface delves much deeper than Siri and Google Now to provide personal assistance, hands-free services and research support.
Designed to efficiently work out complex voice commands, founder Keyvan Mohajer recently unveiled the app and demonstrated its power by running it through a number of complex commands - each with increasing complexity as he went on, and the robotic voice of the app responded at an unbelievable speed. One of the questions in the demonstration was “How many days are there between the day after tomorrow and three days before the second Thursday of November in 2022?” The response was spot-on, and in almost no time.
The company is also launching its Houndify platform that it says will allow developers to add a voice interface to any app. The ultimate plan, Mohajer said, is not just to compete with voice services like Siri and search platforms like Google, but also to replace the default “touch and tap” interface for many uses.
To show off the technology, Mohajer performed a number of searches in rapid succession. One thing that became clear was that the questions can get awfully complicated: “When is the sun going to rise two days before Christmas of 2021 in Tokyo, Japan?” and “What is the population of the capital of the country where the Space Needle is located?”
He also pointed out that queries can build on each other, for example asking for the population of Japan, then asking, “What about China?” Or following a question about the area of China with “How much is that in square kilometers?”
Also impressive: There was no noticeable lag between the queries and the answers. Mohajer said that’s because SoundHound has combined the speech recognition and natural language processing into one engine, rather than treating them as separate tasks, one performed after the other.
And the Hound app plugs into outside services. Its launch partners include Expedia, allowing Hound users to search for and book hotels with voice commands.
There’s still a lot Hound can’t do, requests you make where it just falls back to a Web search. Mohajer says he’s particularly interested in recipes; he wants you to be able to say “Okay Hound, I have a stick of celery, some chicken broth, and a sausage,” and have a recipe returned. To do that and more, SoundHound is working to enlist partners to then execute on those commands (it’s launching with Expedia, but wants to add more to that list). Through the “Houndify” system, developers can integrate Hound technology and voice control into their own apps, and they can also plug their data and APIs into its interface.
Ideally, this is SoundHound’s perfect second act: It’s been working on this technology forever. The app learned to identify songs from your humming, and has a huge database of queries from its own music search engine. Now it’s taking those smarts and applying them toward a much, much larger breadth of topics and actions.
Hound (which is in private beta now for Android, and is coming to iOS soon) is entering an increasingly crowded market: There’s Siri, and Cortana, and Google Now; there’s Viv and Dragon Mobile Assistant and a dozen other ways to get things done by talking to your phone. SoundHound has been of part of refining speech recognition and natural language processing technology—and now it hopes Hound can show us this kind of app is ready to go from party trick to problem-solver.
Designed to efficiently work out complex voice commands, founder Keyvan Mohajer recently unveiled the app and demonstrated its power by running it through a number of complex commands - each with increasing complexity as he went on, and the robotic voice of the app responded at an unbelievable speed. One of the questions in the demonstration was “How many days are there between the day after tomorrow and three days before the second Thursday of November in 2022?” The response was spot-on, and in almost no time.
The company is also launching its Houndify platform that it says will allow developers to add a voice interface to any app. The ultimate plan, Mohajer said, is not just to compete with voice services like Siri and search platforms like Google, but also to replace the default “touch and tap” interface for many uses.
To show off the technology, Mohajer performed a number of searches in rapid succession. One thing that became clear was that the questions can get awfully complicated: “When is the sun going to rise two days before Christmas of 2021 in Tokyo, Japan?” and “What is the population of the capital of the country where the Space Needle is located?”
He also pointed out that queries can build on each other, for example asking for the population of Japan, then asking, “What about China?” Or following a question about the area of China with “How much is that in square kilometers?”
Also impressive: There was no noticeable lag between the queries and the answers. Mohajer said that’s because SoundHound has combined the speech recognition and natural language processing into one engine, rather than treating them as separate tasks, one performed after the other.
And the Hound app plugs into outside services. Its launch partners include Expedia, allowing Hound users to search for and book hotels with voice commands.
There’s still a lot Hound can’t do, requests you make where it just falls back to a Web search. Mohajer says he’s particularly interested in recipes; he wants you to be able to say “Okay Hound, I have a stick of celery, some chicken broth, and a sausage,” and have a recipe returned. To do that and more, SoundHound is working to enlist partners to then execute on those commands (it’s launching with Expedia, but wants to add more to that list). Through the “Houndify” system, developers can integrate Hound technology and voice control into their own apps, and they can also plug their data and APIs into its interface.
Ideally, this is SoundHound’s perfect second act: It’s been working on this technology forever. The app learned to identify songs from your humming, and has a huge database of queries from its own music search engine. Now it’s taking those smarts and applying them toward a much, much larger breadth of topics and actions.
Hound (which is in private beta now for Android, and is coming to iOS soon) is entering an increasingly crowded market: There’s Siri, and Cortana, and Google Now; there’s Viv and Dragon Mobile Assistant and a dozen other ways to get things done by talking to your phone. SoundHound has been of part of refining speech recognition and natural language processing technology—and now it hopes Hound can show us this kind of app is ready to go from party trick to problem-solver.
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