Step aside Siri and Google Now, there’s a new competitor in town. Hound, the personal assistant app that was launched last June from music search service, SoundHound, has moved out of its beta phase and is now available to all on Google Play.
Compared to today’s two dominating digital assistants, Hound is a quick-thinker and can answer complex questions, even if they’re rolled into one. For example, you can ask it, “What is the population and capital for both Japan and China, and what are their areas in square miles and square kilometers? And also, tell me how many people live in India. And what’s the area code for Florence, Italy?” And it will answer.
If you were to ask Siri or Google Now half of that query, you’d get nothing in return. Basically, where other digital assistants leave you hanging, Hound will instantly spit back all of the results.
Image source: SoundHound.
According to vice president and general manager of SoundHound, Keyvan Mohajer, he and his team have been quietly building the voice recognition assistant over the last nine years. Mohajer sees voice control as the natural progression of how we interact with technology. First there were keyboards, followed by touchscreens, and in the next few years, he believes we will be talking to everything around us. He wants Hound to be the center of it all.
Hound uses what the company calls “speech-to-text learning” to speed-up how it processes questions. While most voice assistants first convert your voice to text and then decipher what you’d like to know, Hound does it all at once. The level of question complexity it can understand makes other voice assistants look elementary in comparison.
For example, if you ask Siri for the time, it will tell you. You could even throw in another part to the question, such as “What time is it in Bangkok?” and receive an answer. But if you ask Siri a question like, “When is the sun going to rise two days before New Year’s in the year 2020 in Bangkok, Thailand?” you won’t get an answer. That’s not so with Hound.
But there’s more to this app than spitting out answers to complex questions. It also takes important points into consideration before giving an accurate answer. If you ask it what the mortgage would be on a $1.2 million home, it will ask you about the down payment, mortgage period, and interest rate to find the correct calculation.
One of the main issues with today’s voice assistants is that they don’t understand context. If you ask Siri to find nearby coffee shops, and then tag on a request such as “What about coffee shops with free Wi-Fi?” you’ll be left with the same list you already had. Despite their advances, Siri and Google Now are not yet intelligent enough to maintain a conversation like a real human assistant.
Image source: SoundHound.
This is where Hound excels. Using the app’s partnership with Expedia, you can tell it, “Show me hotels in San Francisco for tomorrow. I’m staying for two nights and want costs between $200 and $300 per night. The hotels should be pet-friendly and have a pool.”
After the results are shown, the app can sort the hotels by the lowest price, excluding those that don’t offer free Wi-Fi.
Hound was first announced last summer as a private beta app on Android, but was limited to 1,000 testers to help give feedback before letting anyone download it on Android and iOS. It can replace Google Now as the default digital assistant on an Android device, but Apple doesn’t allow third-party apps to replace Siri on the iPhone.
Source: Yahoo!
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