Remember SoundHound, that beautiful music recognition app appreciated and used by thousands and thousands of users?
Well, his team has decided to take the field in a sector now populated by three big competitors from Google, Apple and Microsoft: we are talking about Google Now, Siri e Cortana, and at this point it is clear that the developers have released to the world a voice assistant which aims to give them a hard time.
Is called Hound and it was made official today - albeit only in English - as app for Android and iOS after 8 months of testing on a sample of 150000 people. The features are very similar to those of its competitors: just start the app and say "Ok, Hound" to start the conversation, which can take place in natural language and not using specific keywords.
Hound is able to recognize and respond quickly to single questions, questions in sequence linked together and questions at the same time over 100 categories - ranging from news, music, sports, places, flights, navigation. Hound is not yet able to browse the system history or read emails (aspects that will be implemented later), however he can set alarms, translate, write an SMS or use the calculator.
The CEO of SoundHound defined Hound as "faster and smarter" than its competitors: the speed, according to what was declared, is obtained from the approach speech-to-meaning - or the "direct understanding" of speech -, different from that used by its competitors - which instead use two successive phases, the phase speech-to-text (spoken in text) and the stage text-to-meaning (the "translation" of the text into spoken language).
Thanks to the Houndify platform, developers will be able to integrate their apps - and possibly the connected devices - in Hound. You can download Hound for Android and iOS - currently only available for English-language devices - from the links below:
DOWNLOAD | Hound (iTunes Store)
DOWNLOAD | Hound (Google Play Store)
