Last year SoundHound introduced an early version of a voice assistant app for smartphones that works a bit like Siri or Google Voice Search. It’s called Hound, and it leverages SoundHound’s expertise in audio recognition to provide quick responses to your queries.
SoundHound, by the way, was one of the first apps that allowed you to identify songs playing nearby with the aid of a smartphone app and your phone’s microphone.
Now Hound is out of beta and available for download for iOS and Android devices.
For the most part Hound does what other voice assistants do, letting you check weather forecasts, search for restaurants or directions, start a phone call, and more. But SoundHound says its app stands out for a few reasons:
- It’s fast.
- It supports natural language questions rather than specific keywords.
- You can ask follow-up questions or filter your results.
For example, you can ask for a list of nearby restaurants not including Indian food, or you can ask for tomorrow’s forecast… and then follow-up by asking “how about in Cleveland?” to get the forecast for another city.
Is Hound better than the voice software that comes with your phone? That’s probably a matter of personal preference at this point. But it’s nice to have options.
SoundHound has also released the Houndify API which developers can use to add voice capabilities to third-party apps.
via TechCrunch