When it comes to voice assistant features, having it baked into your operating system is probably the best as it would allow deeper control over the entire operating system. However sometimes third-party apps might be more powerful or in tune with what you need, so sometimes users have no choice but to go with a non-native piece of software.
That being said if you’re not happy about how the Google Now voice assistant works at the moment, you might be interested to learn that SoundHound has debuted their own voice assistant app dubbed Hound. Now if you’re wondering why on earth SoundHound is getting into the voice assistant game, let’s not forget that the company’s original app relies on sound recognition to identify songs.
Imagine taking that technology and using it for voice assistant software, how amazing would that be? As it turns out pretty amazing. While we have yet to try it out for ourselves, the demonstrations put on by the developer shows that the app has the speed and accuracy to give Google Now a run for their money.
This is thanks to the app’s ability to collect, synthesize, send, and process your input all at once, as opposed to part by part which is how most speech recognition programs work. At the moment SoundHound’s Hound is currently in a private beta on Android and there are plans to launch it on iOS as well.
Assuming the app works as well as they claim, it certainly sounds like an intriguing piece of software we wouldn’t mind getting our hands on. In the meantime it will also have to contend with the likes of Siri, Google Now, and Cortana which is also launching on iOS and Android.
Filed in . Read more about Apps, Cortana, Google Now, Siri and Soundhound.