If you think Siri’s impressive, wait ’til you talk to Hound.
Hound is an astonishingly powerful voice-based personal assistant developed by Santa Clara-based Soundhound, otherwise known as an app that identifies music marginally better than other such novelties on the market, like Shazam or Musixmatch.
Yesterday, Soundhound released a demo of the technology it set out to develop over a decade ago: an intuitive voice recognition service that comprehends context and understands complex sentence arrangements to communicate with users in a way that eerily human.
She’s a bit of a fast-talker, but remarkably sharp and usefully intelligent.
Do you think they know?
In one example, she’s asked, “what is capital and population for Japan and China and their areas in square miles and square kilometers, and also tell me how many people live in India, and what is the area code for Germany, France, and Italy?” – and accurately answers without missing a beat.
When asked about the monthly payment on a million-dollar home, she’s intelligent enough to ask about the down payment and length of the mortgage period. After providing some more info, Hound almost immediately replies with an answer and visual breakdown of the math. When the interest rate and down payment are changed, she adjusts her response.
Siri, by comparison, has a few neat features. But this, this is some Ex Machina stuff right here:
Hound is currently available as a beta program for Android, with iOS release coming soon.