There's a new voice search app on the block that is gearing up to throw the gauntlet to seasoned pros such as Google Now, Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana. Meet SoundHound Inc's Hound.
On Tuesday, June 2, SoundHound Inc. took the wraps off its Hound voice search app, which is currently in beta for Android. Hound claims to be leagues ahead of functionalities touted by existing virtual assistants such as Siri and Cortana and the company asserts that Hound can answer way more complex queries by comparison.
"Hound is an app that you speak to, and it understands what you are looking for or trying to do. It's like a voice-enabled search engine. It's also like a personal assistant. Being the fastest and easiest way to get the information, entertainment, and communication services you want, Hound is built for a hands-free world, from the ground up," notes the app's description.
According to Keyvan Mohajer, the company's CEO, Hound is set to revolutionize the way people interact with "devices, information and services."
"We believe in a world where we speak to the things around us just as we speak to each other, and we have worked tirelessly for nearly a decade to create the technology that realizes this vision," said Mohajer in a statement.
What makes the Hound app stand out from rivals is its Speech-to-Meaning capabilities. Basically, Hound amalgamates Language Understanding and Speech Recognition as simply decoding words is not enough. The Speech-to-Meaning capability of the new app in turn gives it the capacity to perform faster searchers without typing information.
Hound is able to perform both natural-language processing and voice recognition in a single step instead of translating speech into text separately and then using this text to carry out a search. Multiple steps not only take longer but also increase the error rates.
Moreover, Hound has the ability to understand both the context, as well as the details. One has the option to say all the details at one go or refine their search with follow-up statements. The app's ability to handle multiple complex questions and handle natural voice search is what makes it stand out.
Hound is currently only available for Android (Invite only) and an iOS version is expected to release soon. A downer when compared to rivals, however, is the fact that the app only understands English whereas competing apps can comprehend at least 10 or more languages.
