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SoundHound has entered the race for smart voice recognition communication, and has upped the standard with Hound, a service the company believes performs better than any of its competitors, such as Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana.
SoundHound’s personal digital assistant, available for now Android-only, is about more than just understanding language and delivering directions based on voice command. Famous until now only for its song-identification app, SoundHound is a company launched in 2007.
Since then, it has done very well for itself, with more than 50 million downloads from Google PlayStore. The app that helps you identify either recorded songs or your humming is also available for iOS, Windows and BlackBerry platforms.
CEO Keyvan Mohajer has performed a very convincing demonstration of how well the Hound app works, showing how quickly it can return search results based on a very complex and normally-spoken voice command. Hound’s most impressive feature is its ability of refining results in real time, as the user adds to the initial spoken command.
You could say you wanted to book a four-star room hotel with pet-friendly accommodation and free Wi-Fi in LA, and Hound would be able to translate your query into a result list of hotels. More than that, Hound can also make intricate web searches for stock updates, events near you, news, weather and so much more.
Hound enters a rather crowded market of personal virtual assistants, but according to Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, it has a great potential of reaching the top spot in front of Google Now, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana.
Enge says there is plenty of room in this field, where tech giants are investing a lot of effort because of the constant competition to improve what is believed to be the next step in the search business.
If you’ve tried giving instructions to Apple’s Siri, for example, you know what a hassle it is to perfectly enunciate every word so Siri can get it right. Hound plans to end that, as the voice recognition capabilities are out-of-this-world.
But Hound went way past just recognizing words, as it can process in no time complex results based on both context and details. Hound does indeed deliver on its advertisement: it’s the new way of searching and completing task faster without typing.
Back in October, Stone Temple Consulting released a study on personal digital assistants and Google Now proved to lead in number of queries addressed. Google’s service also won in the category of accuracy when compared to Siri or Cortana.
Image Source: SoundHound
