These days, Keyvan Mohajer, SoundHound’s CEO, has declared that he managed to release the Hound app. We are talking about a tool that will allow users to search for any kind of answers, but also to complete tasks through voice commands.
This means that starting with this day, Hound is available for iPhone and Android devices. We are waiting to see how much popularity will got this new app, knowing the fact that there are some serious competitors on the market.
For the moment, this app has passed the beta version, which will probably encourage people to try this new tool. For starters, let’s make a small step in the past, approximately 10 years ago, when SoundHound founder, Keyvan Mohajer, had an idea and took it to a group of investors. Mohajer wanted to build a tool that will allow people to talk to computers, as if they were speaking to another person.
That was an incredible idea and he believed that such things could really be turned into reality.
So, what was the only problem that he had?
Well, it might take 10 years to build such tool.
“We had this vision in the year 2000,” Mohajer declared. “We actually positioned the company to be the leader in that. We knew it would take many years. We were working on this well before Apple, well before Siri; we wanted to own all the core technologies. We wanted it to be a step change in quality,” he added.
Of course, investors have been happy to help Mohajer, but they thought that ten years is a long period of time and he needed to show them something that will happen in three years. So, Midomi was build.
The service allowed users to hum the tune of a song and Midomi identified it. After approximately two years, Mohajer launched SoundHound, which did the same thing for music overheard in the background or on the radio.
But, now, after approximately 10 years, Hound was launched. This new digital voice assistant app is available for everyone to enjoy and has some new tricks that combines both Siri and Google Now.
Hound is available for free in the Google Play and App Store. So, this new app was built for handling multiple demands at once. Moreover, Hound seems much faster at identifying words and delivering answers.
At the demonstration, Keyvan Mohajer declared that this app uses “speech to recognition” technology, which means that users will receive faster search results and better answers for complicated questions.
Hound app is not very different compared to Siri, Google Now or Alexa. Of course, there is certainly a lot of work to be done, but at first sight, Hound has some great results. This new app is much faster at recognizing and processing queries, but it has to collect a lot of data and build its own knowledge graph.
Another goal for this app is to be integrated or distributed across other applications. So, in the end, it looks like users have many voice-assistant options available to help them. Siri is very good at setting reminders, Google Now is great at searching the web and Hound is amazing at handling complicated requests.