You may know SoundHound as not-Shazam, or that nifty app that can identify your mystery song via humming, singing or through a recorded track. And now, a whole decade after the app’s creator first pitched his original idea to investors, it seems like the application will finally do what it was initially created to do—answer your super complex (and even a bit confusing) questions and churn out answers at remarkable speed.
No Question Too Weird for the Hound App
Keyvan Mohajer, founder of SoundHound, began the demonstration of SoundHound’s new voice search app dubbed Hound with an oddly phrased question: What is the population of capital of the country in which Space Needle is located? This strange phrasing was meant to showcase just how well the application can analyze what was being asked. As the answer immediately came (The population of Washington, DC is 601,723), it was obvious the app knew exactly what it was doing. Mohajer then came up with an even more awkwardly-worded question: How many days are there between the day after tomorrow and three days before the second Thursday of November in 2022? The app did not fail that time, either.
In Comparison with Other Digital Voice Assistant Apps
The reason Hound can perform so well and so quickly is because, as Mohajer states, it combines both voice recognition and natural voice understanding and processes them simultaneously, while other digital voice assistants split them up and handle them on several separate levels.
While Hound may not have a cheeky personality like Siri or Cortana, it is special in the sense that it’s part research tool, part (albeit personality-less) personal assistant and part hands-free system. And really, really fast, too.
For now, Hound will only be available in invitation-only beta for Android and it’ll be coming as a stand-alone to iOS soon.
